Each year a small portion of AoIR conference fees go toward several travel scholarships for junior scholars to attend the conference. We want to recognize our scholarship recipients and share with you a little bit about them and their research interests.
Who are you?
Yá’át’ééh (hello). My name is Nicholet Deschine Parkhurst. I’m an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and I’m also Navajo. I’m a Ph.D. student in the Justice Studies program in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. My Twitter handle is @RedstreakGirl. I use the pronouns she/her/hers.
What is your background?
I earned a Master of Social Work and a Master of Public Policy from Arizona State University. My background is in Native American health equity, particularly understanding the social determinants of health that impact Native American peoples in the United States. In the past I’ve worked as a policy analyst for an intertribal organization conducting policy analysis around opioid usage in Tribal communities and as research project manager of a community-based participatory research project working with urban American Indian communities on substance abuse prevention for American Indian youth.
What is your current area of study?
My current research is at the intersection Native American and Indigenous human rights, Indigenous resistance and resurgence movements, and digital activism. Currently, I’m researching American Indian and Indigenous social media activism of the #NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) movement.
Describe the research you will present at #AoIR2022.
In collaboration with Alaina George (Navajo), Ph.D. Candidate in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, we are presenting our research titled, “Infrastructures of Care in NDN Spaces: Mutual Aid as a Form of Radical Relationality.” We examine how the Internet and social media platforms become sites of decolonizing work observed through mutual aid during the COVID-19 pandemic. We approached our research with decolonizing methodologies and an Indigenous feminist ethics of care. As Diné (Navajo people) scholars, we utilize Diné theories of relationality to understand how kinship and responsibility are foundations of mutual aid as they’ve been employed by Diné people.
Have you presented at AoIR in the past? If yes, what has been your experience? If #AoIR2022 Dublin is your first AoIR conference, what made you choose this conference? What do you expect from it?
I presented virtually at #AoIR2021 and so AoIR 2022 this will be my first in-person AoIR Conference. While the virtual conference made it easy to view the presentations at my own pace the time difference made it challenging to attend the virtual gatherings and to network. I’m looking forward to meeting AoIR Members that I’ve communicated with online or that I met in AoIRTown.
