Pamela Stern, PhD

Phone: 778.782.6954
Email: pamela_stern@sfu.ca

Dr. Stern is a research associate and adjunct professor with the Centre for Sustainable Community Development. She is socio-cultural anthropologist whose primary interests concern the way that individual citizens and communities respond to and shape the conditions of modern life and in doing so participate in making public policy. She has degrees from the University of Florida, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Dr. Stern is the principal investigator for NGOs on a Northern Frontier, a SSHRC-funded study of community development in rural northern Ontario, which she is conducting with Peter Hall. This project looks at the role that non-governmental organizations (usually called non-profits in Canada) play in development in Canada. There has been much academic attention to the activities of these organizations in less-developed countries, but social scientist have largely ignored similar activities occurring in Canada and other highly developed countries. The research is revealing quite striking similarities in the practices of development in the global south and north, and aims to contribute to public policy debates about the appropriate locus of development activity.

In addition to her work on NGOs, Dr. Stern has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the Canadian Inuit community of Ulukhaktok (formerly Holman) in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region of the Northwest Territories since 1982. Her most recent ethnographic fieldwork there examined how people’s everyday experiences with wage labour, unemployment, and social change affect the ways that Inuit participate in the Canadian nation. Her next northern project will concern indigenous participation in the proposed Mackenzie Gas Project.

Dr. Stern has written extensively about Inuit. She is the author of the Historical Dictionary of the Inuit (Scarecrow 2004) and co-editor of Critical Inuit Studies (Nebraska 2006).