Claudio Aporta

Professor, Canadian Chair, Marine Environmental Protection
World Maritime University

Claudio Aporta was born and raised in the province of Mendoza, Argentina – where he completed his BA in Communication at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. He moved to Canada in 1997, and he earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Alberta.  He was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval, in Quebec. He was a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University (2005–2013) and at the Marine Affairs Program at Dalhousie University). He held the Canada-US Fulbright Chair at the University of Washington in 2012. He is also a faculty member of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University. His research is at a crossroads between Marine Management, Anthropology and Geography.  

Professor Aporta has done ethnographic research in the Canadian Arctic since 1998. He has documented Inuit knowledge and use of marine and coastal areas in all regions of the Canadian Arctic. His research has also focused on the geographic representation of indigenous environmental knowledge. Some outcomes of his work include the co-creation of digital atlases (see http://paninuittrails.org/, and http://sikuatlas.ca/index.html, https://www.ntkp.ca/, https://www.anijaarniq.com/, http://pikialasorsuaq.org/en/Resources/Pikialasorsuaq-Atlas ).

His current teaching and research interests are connected to co-management, Marine Spatial Planning, indigenous and local coastal communities’ knowledge, and knowledge mobilization in cross-cultural settings. His ongoing projects include documenting Inuit mobility networks in Arctic Canada, researching the impact of shipping in areas of significance to Inuit communities, and exploring knowledge visualization and knowledge sharing of benthic ecosystems in several marine and coastal areas of Nova Scotia.