Languages Spoken: Lakota, Arabic, English
Joseph Gazing Wolf (Lakota/Amazigh), (he/him) is an Environmental Life Sciences PhD student and NSF Graduate Fellow. His research interests germinate from his experiences as a tribal shepherd in the Nile valley and as a buffalo range rider in the Northern Plains of the US. An emerging theme of his research is the restoration of social-ecological resilience through biocultural diversity in tribal and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, BIPOC, agricultural communities. He works to elucidate the socio-cultural, agricultural, economic, governmental, and ecological variables that contribute to social-ecological resilience and sustainable livelihoods, with a particular focus on the unique strengths, contributions, and struggles of women farmers/ranchers. In this vein, he is currently exploring locust management in BIPOC communities in West Africa and Latin America. He is developing the same approach with Tatanka (buffalo) as a model organism to explore social-ecological resilience in Native American communities throughout the Great Plains. Wolf also has a strong interest in learning about the barriers that BIPOC students experience in STEM education and research, and implementing programs to overcome those barriers. He also has several side projects focusing on the conservation of threatened native species on working rangelands and in urban environments (prairie dogs, bats). Wolf’s research is centered on a strong appreciation for collaborative (ranchers/farmers and tribal/governmental), interdisciplinary research that is a fusion of applied decolonized community-driven science and traditional ecological knowledge. He utilizes stakeholder interviews and surveys, citizen science, field observations, field/greenhouse/lab experiments, and emersion in traditional cultural events. Overall, his primary goal as a researcher is to help strengthen tribal and BIPOC community autonomy, food sovereignty, sustainable livelihoods, the revitalization of traditional arts and culture, and mental and physical well-being.
Languages Spoken: Lakota, Arabic, English