Graduate Students M-P

Delaney Mitchell

Social-Cultural Anthropology

delaney.mitchell@berkeley.edu

Delaney Mitchell is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is developing a situated account of Alaska’s shifting material and symbolic subterranean. Amid unprecedented permafrost melt, Delaney spent 18 months conducting ethnographic and archival research in her home community and several other intimately known sites. There, she has sought to understand what the shifting social and ecological landscape of Arctic and subarctic permafrost can teach us about the contested cultural lives of climate change. Building on close engagement with Arctic peoples and regional archives alongside the insights of Alaska Native, feminist, and queer studies, her work critically analyzes the conceptual frames within which Alaskan permafrost and permafrost dwelling peoples have historically been interpreted: historical materialism, psychoanalysis, and geology. It traces the way that the historical pathologization of Alaska Native peoples’ response to social and ecological change continues to color the gendered and racial landscape of contemporary climate contentions; the ways that permafrost degradation upends Arctic ways of life while simultaneously challenging the settler-colonial infrastructures of the family, private property, and the state; and the way that Arctic preservation—of the permafrost itself as well as the many social and organic artifacts held within—has become a site of political and ethical contestation. Delaney is from Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Valley. She calls the mouth of the Knik home. Prior to Berkeley, Delaney received a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, a Master of Science in Gender, Policy and Inequalities from the London School of Economics, and a Master of Laws from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Delaney has received support and funding for her dissertation from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fritz O. Fernström Fellowship, Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, Institute for European Studies Nordic Center at Berkeley, and the Rasmuson Foundation. Research Interests: Arctic Anthropology, Alaska Native and Indigenous Studies, Queer and Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies, Environmental Humanities, Psychoanalysis, Political Economy.