Gaining insights for engaging communities in climate actions: A study in Mongolia (5/2023-5/2025)

For my dissertation, I conducted ethnographic research with Mongolian nomadic herders to examine how local communities perceive and respond to climate change. The study investigated how herders interpret climate impacts, the strategies they employ to adapt, and the institutional support they view as essential. Living and working alongside herder households, I engaged in daily household activities and participated in community and cultural events, while carrying out participatory field observations. These observations helped refine my interview protocols, which I then used in semi-structured interviews with 25 households, involving 52 participants.
Findings revealed that herders face increasingly frequent and unpredictable extreme weather events, including dzuds (harsh winters with heavy snow), droughts, and floods. They described the severe impacts of these events on pasturelands, livestock, livelihoods, and the preservation of pastoral traditions. In adapting to these challenges, herders draw on local knowledge and social and material resources in the community. At the same time, they highlighted the critical role of institutional support in enabling sustainable adaptation. Importantly, herders identified problems or gaps in legal, social, political, financial, and economic aspects of the infrastructure and engaged in infrastructuring, in actions or proposals, to improve it. These findings challenge conventional views of infrastructure as purely technical, static, and fixed, instead highlighting how local people actively and agentively reimagine and reshape multi-dimensional infrastructures in response to climate change.

Publications

I was selected as one of the participants in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Conferences of Learning Sciences 2024 in Buffalo, USA, where I shared my research and received valuable feedback on data analysis. 

Wu, Q. (2024). Understanding Mongolian nomadic herders’ learning during participation in an adaptation intervention. In Lindgren, R., Asino, T. I., Kyza, E. A., Looi, C. K., Keifert, D. T., & Suárez, E. (Eds.). (2024). Proceedings of the 18th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp.144-145). Buffalo, USA (June 10-14, 2024).

After 2 years of field research, data analysis, and writing, I defended my doctoral thesis on May 1st, 2025.  

Wu, Q. (2025). Understanding Relations, Learning, and Transformations in Mongolian Herders’ Climate Change Adaptation. University of Illinois Chicago.

I shared a poster from my dissertation research at the Adaptation Futures 2025 conference in New Zealand. This presentation particularly focused on the implications my research provides for policies and practices in support of climate change adaptation

Wu, Q. (2025).Community-centered infrastructuring amongst Mongolian nomadic herders: implications for policies and practices in support of climate change adaptation. Adaptation Futures 2025. Christchurch, New Zealand (October 13-16, 2025).

A cross-sector and cross-disciplinary paradigm to the transition from a linear to a circular economy (1/2022-5/2023)

I worked on a Sustainable Regional System Research Network (SRS RN) project led by the Director of the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago. The project aimed to develop a convergent paradigm to support the transition from a linear to a circular economy. It convened university researchers from multiple disciplines and institutions, alongside government agencies, private companies, and NGOs.
As a Learning Sciences scholar, my role was to document, monitor, analyze, and visualize learning processes, using these insights to advance the team’s progress toward a convergent paradigm. I collected data from individuals, small groups, and the whole team, then analyzed the findings to facilitate team discussions and reflections on collaboration and communication. I reported the process of developing the paradigm in the proposal for full funding.
This experience not only strengthened my expertise in studying learning within complex, cross-sector collaborations but also inspired my dissertation research on learning in sustainability transitions and climate change adaptation.