Last Updated on September 23, 2025, 9:40 am ET
Photo by Borealomas, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A mature forest can take decades to regenerate after it is harvested for timber. But what happens when the human institutions charged with its management change course or even disappear in the meantime? A recent book by anthropologist of science Tom Özden-Schilling shows how institutional restructuring impacts the kinds of knowledge it is possible to produce and the livelihoods available to those who produce it. The Ends of Research: Indigenous and Settler Science after the War in the Woods (Duke University Press, 2023) traces the rise of “technocratic conservationism” in northwest British Columbia as a way of mediating conflicts over resource extraction that had boiled over in tense anti-logging blockades. A number of research initiatives exploring alternatives sprang up in the 1990s, but when the provincial government’s support waned researchers had to devise new strategies to keep these experiments going.
The research repertoires that Özden-Schilling describes comprise a mix of digital and decidedly analog techniques. Members of the Gitxsan Nation used GIS software to generate detailed “countermaps” of official documents, which were layered with cultural knowledge gathered in interviews with Elders in order to shore up territory claims. And while computer simulations were increasingly used by researchers elsewhere in Canada to project how the forests of northwest British Columbia might evolve, the reliability of these projections still rested on labor-intensive field measurement. Without the resources to dispatch full teams of experts for weeks on end, Indigenous researchers adopted an approach called transect mapping that allowed them to stitch together the part-time contributions of assistants without prior training. Meanwhile, White researchers who had built careers for themselves in and around the forest were exhorted to frame their work in terms of resilience to make it more appealing to policymakers—and the philanthropic organizations filling the gap left behind by state retrenchment.
As he places disparate knowledge projects into dialogue, Özden-Schilling advances a shared understanding of the researchers behind them as “untethered” from legacy institutions. Those who wished to stay in this remote place had to cobble together grants and contracts to support themselves until the next one came along, or else go into “professional exile” in other sectors or parts of the country. The stakes were different, to be sure, for inmigrants and for those living on ancestral homelands. But in each case, the desire to stay went beyond contributing to the scientific record or protecting the old-growth pine. It was also about the chance to live a life on the land and to make good on what one’s predecessors had begun, setting aside any purity test that would make continuance impossible. As Özden-Schilling writes of the researcher selected to take over one of the few Forest Service jobs in the region: “Her inheritance contained no instructions for moving forward; only the injunction that she somehow proceed.”
The wistful mood pervading The Ends of Research stems from a particular moment at the turn of the century when, in one researcher’s words, “the government stopped caring about science.” Yet, in an endnote, Özden-Schilling acknowledges that he was “often encouraged to view the unraveling of provincial support for research in the early 2000s as complementary to the ‘war on science’ playing out during [his] main research period, a new ‘war’ led by then prime minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative federal government of Canada.” Reading The Ends of Research in 2025, it is hard not to transpose its insights yet again to the context of the Trump administration’s current attacks on scientific institutions in the United States. Like Özden-Schilling’s interlocutors, US-based researchers whose grants have been canceled, areas of study deemed inappropriate, and agencies shuttered are rethinking their attachments to institutions they once relied on. While it lacks the bullishness of more programmatic efforts to sustain societal investment in science, The Ends of Research does offer hope for lives and lines of research that manage to persist in unexpected forms, like new growth after a harrowing burn.
Takeaways for Library Leaders
The Ends of Research depicts a setting for knowledge production that is geographically removed from the nearest university. The provision of research library services in such settings is a topic that has been gaining visibility, as with the breakout session at ARL’s Spring 2025 Association Meeting about libraries and the Cooperative Extension System. A recent article showed how one field station library augments a base level of year-round service with a seasonal staff position for supporting place-based instruction. To assess the right service model for their context, libraries at institutions with field research stations can encourage periodic visits by staff from their principal location to better understand needs on the ground.
But how can research libraries support initiatives like those described in The Ends of Research, which do not have formal ties to a parent institution? Partnerships with community archives present one useful model, which has oriented libraries toward a post-custodial approach that focuses on enabling and interfacing with someone else’s infrastructure. The Bulkley Valley Research Centre’s data hub may yet become home to the maps and other technical artifacts that Özden-Schilling encountered in the homes of the researchers he came to know. Yet, in cases where standalone initiatives wind down and the risk of data loss is imminent, libraries can consider a more traditional collecting function in light of a commitment to preserving the history of science in their region.
Finally, as a growing proportion of PhDs establish careers outside of academia, the condition of being “untethered” to a knowledge institution is increasingly the norm for researchers moving into business, government, and nonprofit work. Libraries have a role to play in mitigating this material and symbolic sense of separation from the research enterprise. Even as they prioritize the needs of current institutional affiliates, libraries can look for opportunities to maintain ties with previous affiliates through access to selected resources and services or to cooperate with other units in extending ties to additional affiliates. More inclusively still, libraries can prioritize investments in open that decouple a life in research from an institutional status that is, by design, conferred on some and withheld from others.
