Tahnee Prior

Tahnee Prior is a PhD candidate in global governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo, and a visiting researcher the International Institute for Applied Systems in Laxenburg, Austria. She holds a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her doctoral work in global environmental governance examines the role of legal systems in maintaining or preventing our ability to adapt to rapidly changing and complex environments, like the Arctic. Tahnee has written on gender and the circumpolar North as team member of a Finnish Academy project on "Human Security as a Promotional Tool for Societal Security in the Arctic" and as a contributing author to the 2016 Arctic Resilience Report. She is also co-leading a NordForsk-funded project titled "Women of the Arctic", as well as a soon-to-be digital platform for women to share research and stories on the circumpolar North.

Throughout her doctoral work, Tahnee has served as a  research assistant on a range of projects including a SSHRC-funded project on "Understanding Sovereignty and Security in the Circumpolar Arctic" with Dr. Whitney Lackenbauer; EU-Canada Arctic Strategies with Dr. Whitney Lackenbauer and Suzanne Lalonde; 'Challenges and Opportunities for the Governance of Socio-Ecological Systems in a Comparative Perspective' with Dr. John McLevey and Dr. Vanessa Schweizer; and indigenous visions of mass extinction with Dr. Audra Mitchell. She has also collaborated with Dr. Bessma Momani and Jillian Stirk on their The Pluralism Project, funded by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation; the Danish Alternative Party on their \#wearebiggerthanthis campaign; and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives on their Alternative Federal Budget 2017. In 2016, she was humbled to land on Corporate Knight's \#30under30 list of Sustainability Leaders in Canada.

Previously, she was the lead author of a Finnish Foreign Ministry project at the intersection of gender, climate change, and human rights. During her time at the Arctic Centre in Rovaniemi, Finland, Tahnee was an editorial assistant to Dr. Timo Koivurova and Nigel Bankes during the final stages of The Proposed Nordic Saami Convention, a book that builds on the legal chapter of the Arctic Human Development Report and aims to strengthen the recognition of Indigenous property regimes in Arctic states.

While working on her master's degree in global governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Tahnee was a CIGI Junior Fellow and a research assistant at the University of Waterloo's School of Environment, Enterprise and Development. Tahnee's master's thesis on polycentricity in the governance of persistent organic pollutants in the Arctic was published in the Yearbook of Polar Law (2013) and presented at the 2011 Falling Walls LAB (100 scholars under thirty) at the International Conference on Future Breakthroughs In Science and Society.

In her spare time, Tahnee co-builds global communities like the Sandbox Network, a family of young changemakers on five continents who excel in and collaborate across their respective fields, from opera singing to engineering bionic eyes. She is also a member of the Gender CC --- Women for Climate Justice network, Tromsø-Umeå-Arkhangelsk-Kingston Network on Gender and Law, the University of Waterloo Complexity Working Group, the Balsillie School of International Affairs Environment Working Group, the Nordic Research Network for Sami and Indigenous Peoples' Law, the Arctic Social Sciences Association, and the Association of Early Polar Career Scientists. You can follow her here: [@tahnsta]