How Do 40+ Diverse Experts Synthesize across Disciplines and Knowledge Systems?

Some years ago, Cyrus Harris, a hunter in Kotzebue, Alaska, realized Elders living in care facilities suffered without access to their traditional foods. Cyrus then collaborated with other co-workers from Maniilaq, government food safety regulators, and food scientists to safely supply traditional foods to Indigenous elders in government-regulated care facilities. With Cyrus and so many others as inspiration, SEARCH synthesizes Indigenous and scientific understanding of Arctic environmental changes and their consequences for diverse audiences. Illustrating how SEARCH collaborates with diverse groups and across multiple ways of knowing has become vital to our shared understanding of our work together. Thanks to conversations with our Integration Group, we’ve developed a visual tool to show how SEARCH works. A community facing a novel concern might engage community, scientific, or policy experts, each of whom might propose solutions based on their specific expertise. In SEARCH, experts from diverse knowledge systems synthesize their collective knowledge to co-produce solutions that bring together, in a coherent whole, the best available information including local knowledge.