In this episode, Sweta Baniya speaks with Dr. Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq about responsibly balancing regionally focused scholarly inquiry with a respect for local priorities, grass-roots sovereignty, and indigenous knowledges.

Dr. Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq is an Iñupiaq scholar and a Tribal citizen of the Noorvik Native Community in Northwest Alaska. She is an associate professor of technical and scientific communication and the founding director of the Center for Sustainable Engagement in the Arctic (CSEA) at Virginia Tech. Her work focuses on Arctic research, data governance, and research methodologies that support community-led initiatives and scientific innovation. She has extensive experience developing research methods, partnerships, and programs that facilitate collaboration between Arctic communities and research institutions. She is the academic lead for Arctic community-led, transdisciplinary initiatives that focus on language documentation, NLP, data literacy, digital archiving, and increasing local research capacities. She serves as a co-lead for the IARPC Participatory Research and Indigenous Leadership in Research (PILR) collaborative team and as co-lead for the IASC ICARP IV RPT7 on Services, Infrastructure, Logistics, and Technology. Dr. Itchuaqiyaq has received numerous honors, including the 2023 & 2025 CCCC Best Article on Philosophy or Theory of Technical or Scientific Communication.

Sweta Baniya is an associate professor of rhetoric, professional and technical writing at Virginia Tech. She specializes on transnational disaster studies, risk/crisis communication, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and community engagement.

Her research centers around the ever evolving and challenging global issue of natural and manmade disasters, such as earthquakes or climate change. In doing so, her research draws together non-Western and Western paradigms with the goal of demonstrating how such combinations produce not only new insights but also important public interventions. Her applied research draws these non-Western paradigms into dialogue with contemporary rhetorical framings of natural and manmade disasters for the purpose of supporting local and global communities faced with responding to such events.

Her works have appeared on Encultration, Journal of Business & Technical Communication, Journal of Technological Studies. She is also founding member of nextGEN, an international graduate student listserv.