Arina Melkozernova

Throughout my career, I have worked in different fields: teaching science to high school students (Biology/Chemistry), conducting scientific research in biology (Ichthyology/Ecology/Microbiology), teaching creativity to university students (Intermedia/Art Appreciation), and training educators to enhance teaching and learning with technology (Instructional Design). My background experiences have sparked my interest in further examining the relationships between the arts and the sciences in non-Western and Western value systems. My research focus is on developing and implementing creative solutions for digitizing culturally valuable information to promote the notion of “sovereignty” in relation to digital technologies and infrastructure. My goal is to help with the requests and prospects of a new generation of tribal knowledge workers.

I am committed to objective research that employs systems thinking, advanced data analysis, visualization, narrative analysis, and digital mapping techniques, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of our world. These skills enable me to conduct evidence-based and community-oriented research that captures the complexities of social, ecological, and cultural systems. As a researcher, I performed literature reviews to inform research design for my projects. I collected and analyzed qualitative data to inform community practices and decisions.

My work aims to bridge the gap between technological advancements and traditional ecological wisdom, fostering a holistic understanding of our environment and its interconnected systems. In collaboration with the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana Heritage Department, I assisted Professor Denise Bates with the digital archiving project “Making History Accessible” by adapting a digital platform, Mukurtu, that permits the preservation of their traditional knowledge and native language. In partnership with the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians of Alabama, I conducted interviews about their traditional foodways and medicinal plants. I prepared materials compiled from the Smithsonian collections and archives for the MOWA Choctaw museum displays. This community-based research honors the wisdom of their ancestors and empowers future stewards of the land to sustain and enrich our planet's ecological and cultural landscapes.

I am also involved in community-based research with the Italian farmers guided by Professor Juliann Vitullo, “Strategies for Preserving the Cultural- and Bio-diversity of Traditional Southern Italian Foodways,” which examines the narratives of their stewardship of the traditional local peasant knowledge and the indigenous strategies for preserving biodiversity. I studied how and why women farmers in Italy choose to manage multifunctional farms that prioritize place-based biological and cultural knowledge through the preservation of local edible and medicinal plant varieties, traditional agricultural practices, and cooperative models, which are culturally specific to the food security needs of their communities. To understand better why specific topics in the Mediterranean Diet studies rise and fall in prominence over time, we proposed a collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center to conduct the computational analysis of occurrences of Mediterranean Diet keywords in the corpus built from the volumes in the HathiTrust Library published between 1950 and 2020 in English. The preliminary findings produced evidence that contributed to a critical perspective on the link between power relations and food choices and services, which are essential to communities’ decision-making processes about their food sovereignty.

By mapping traditional ecological knowledge, I create visual narratives for designing public displays highlighting the intricate connections between culture and ecology. Under the supervision of Professor Joni Adamson, my research project about the nutritious values of folk varieties of sunflowers native to the harsh desert climate in collaboration with the Boyce Thompson Arboretum inquires about the Indigenous community’s memories of traditional sunflower cultivation in Arizona and the Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK). It is associated with their story of sunflower origin and the history of the fifth most important oil crop, a scientific hybrid developed from the varieties of sunflowers used in industrial agriculture.

I am committed to objective research that employs systems thinking, advanced data analysis, visualization, narrative analysis, and digital mapping techniques, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of our world. These skills enable me to conduct evidence-based and community-oriented research that captures the complexities of social, ecological, and cultural systems. As a researcher, I performed literature reviews to inform research design for my projects. I collected and analyzed qualitative data to inform community practices and decisions. 

My work aims to bridge the gap between technological advancements and traditional ecological wisdom, fostering a holistic understanding of our environment and its interconnected systems. In collaboration with the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana Heritage Department, I assisted Professor Denise Bates with the digital archiving project “Making History Accessible” by adapting a digital platform, Mukurtu, that permits the preservation of their traditional knowledge and native language. In partnership with the MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians of Alabama, I conducted interviews about their traditional foodways and medicinal plants. I prepared materials compiled from the Smithsonian collections and archives for the MOWA Choctaw museum displays. This community-based research honors the wisdom of their ancestors and empowers future stewards of the land to sustain and enrich our planet's ecological and cultural landscapes.

I am also involved in community-based research with the Italian farmers guided by Professor Juliann Vitullo, “Strategies for Preserving the Cultural- and Bio-diversity of Traditional Southern Italian Foodways,” which examines the narratives of their stewardship of the traditional local peasant knowledge and the indigenous strategies for preserving biodiversity. I studied how and why women farmers in Italy choose to manage multifunctional farms that prioritize place-based biological and cultural knowledge through the preservation of local edible and medicinal plant varieties, traditional agricultural practices, and cooperative models, which are culturally specific to the food security needs of their communities. To understand better why specific topics in the Mediterranean Diet studies rise and fall in prominence over time, we proposed a collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center to conduct the computational analysis of occurrences of Mediterranean Diet keywords in the corpus built from the volumes in the HathiTrust Library published between 1950 and 2020 in English. The preliminary findings produced evidence that contributed to a critical perspective on the link between power relations and food choices and services, which are essential to communities’ decision-making processes about their food sovereignty.

By mapping traditional ecological knowledge, I create visual narratives for designing public displays highlighting the intricate connections between culture and ecology. Under the supervision of Professor Joni Adamson, my research project about the nutritious values of folk varieties of sunflowers native to the harsh desert climate in collaboration with the Boyce Thompson Arboretum inquires about the Indigenous community’s memories of traditional sunflower cultivation in Arizona and the Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK). It is associated with their story of sunflower origin and the history of the fifth most important oil crop, a scientific hybrid developed from the varieties of sunflowers used in industrial agriculture.

Read more about my research here and here.