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Karen Hébert

Associate Professor

• Email Karen Hébert
• 613-520-2600 ext 8370

Biography

My research examines changing natural resource economies, environmental politics, and struggles over sustainability in the subarctic and circumpolar North.  An ethnographer by training, I work at the intersection of critical human geography, cultural anthropology, and political ecology, contributing to cross-disciplinary conversations in environmental studies and science studies.  I have conducted long-term fieldwork in Alaska, primarily in the Bristol Bay region of southwestern Alaska.  My first major research project focused on historical and recent transformations in the Alaska salmon industry.  In recent years, I have explored how the experience of living in an environment “at risk” shapes livelihoods and resource politics across coastal Alaska.  In collaboration with �Ӱ�ԭ�� University faculty member Danielle DiNovelli-Lang and a student research team, I have followed the activities of scientists, activists, government officials, and rural residents in two different Alaskan regions to analyze the shifting nature of resource development debates involving mining, logging, and fishing.

Selected Publications:

Journal Articles

DiNovelli-Lang, Danielle and Karen Hébert. 2019. Rural Alaska: The Struggle for Subsistence. Journal for the Anthropology of North America 22(2): 69-71. 

Hébert, Karen and Samara Brock. Forthcoming, 2016. Counting and Counter-Mapping: Contests over the Making of a Mining District in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Science as Culture 25(4).  

Hébert, Karen. 2016. Chronicle of a Disaster Foretold:  Scientific Risk Assessment, Public Participation, and the Politics of Imperilment in Bristol Bay, Alaska. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) 22 (S1): 108-126. 

Hébert, Karen. 2015. Enduring Capitalism: Instability, Precariousness, and Cycles of Change in an Alaskan Salmon Fishery. American Anthropologist 117 (1): 32-46. 

Hébert, Karen. 2014. The Matter of Market Devices: Economic Transformation in a Southwest Alaskan Salmon Fishery. Geoforum 53: 21-30. 

Hébert, Karen, and Diana Mincyte. 2014. Self-Reliance beyond Neoliberalism: Rethinking Autonomy at the Edges of Empire. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2): 206-222. 

Foley, Paul, and Karen Hébert. 2013. Alternative Regimes of Transnational Certification for Alaska Salmon: Marketization, Territoriality, and Governance. Environment and Planning A 45 (11): 2734-2751. 

Hébert, Karen. 2010. In Pursuit of Singular Salmon: Paradoxes of Sustainability and the Quality Commodity. Science as Culture 19 (4): 553-581. 

Book Chapters

DiNovelli-Lang, Danielle, Karen Hébert, and Sonya Gray. 2018. The Environment and Industrial Labor. Gender: Space, Aimee Meredith Cox, ed., pp. 51-66. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Macmillan Reference USA.

Hébert, Karen. 2014. The Social Forms of Local Self-Reliance: Complexities of Community in the Alaskan Transition Movement. In Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude, Juliet B. Schor and Craig J. Thompson, eds, pp. 63-94. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

Other Publications

DiNovelli-Lang, Danielle, and Karen Hébert. 2018. Ecological Labor. In “The Naturalization of Work,” Sarah Besky and Alexander Blanchette, eds. Cultural Anthropology’s Theorizing the Contemporary series. July 26. 

Hébert, Karen, with Danielle DiNovelli-Lang. 2016. Working with, Part II: On the Work of Collaboration in Coastal Alaska. Envirosociety – the blog of Environment and Society. 

DiNovelli-Lang, Danielle, with Karen Hébert. 2015. Working with. Envirosociety – the blog of Environment and Society.