Although retired from Arizona State University since 2018, Jan Stanley continues to conduct research into individual and collective human development in socio-historical and ecological context. Using narrative and ethnographic research methods, she works with research participants as co-investigators to gain insights into the complex dynamics of nested human, nature, political and economic systems (all considered to be developmental contexts) as those contexts shape each other over time.
Her current work initiated in Iceland’s West Fjords in 2013 as an inquiry into human affinity with natural place and continues to increase in scope as expanding understandings suggest new questions. Currently, she investigates with a landscape geographer the co-evolution of landscape with human and more-than-human animals on an increasingly deserted and remote peninsula in the northern West Fjords. Also under consideration are national and regional policies, priorities and biases that preceded and accompany the near abandonment of this once active, food-producing area.