Clinical/Community Division

My research focuses primarily on Native North America, with a particular emphasis on the Arctic. I have been working since 1994 with Inuit in Nunavut, Canada, on suicide prevention and community wellness, exploring various approaches to community-based participatory action research. Current research is looking at the process of collective action among Inuit and other indigenous youth at the community level and beyond, and links between such action and a number of individual and collective aspects of well-being. In one comparative, participatory study we are examining Indigenous youth resilience in communities across Siberia, Alaska, Arctic Canada (Nunavut), Greenland, and northern Norway. I am also working on a model of suicide within a broader framework of cultural mimesis: examining how idioms of distress and well-being are diffused socially and internalized psychologically. In my work, suicide is one example of a psychological and cultural idiom that becomes a door to explorations at the interface of collective and personal agency, community-university-government collaboration, and mind and culture.

Representative Publications:

• Kral, M.J., & Idlout, L. (2009). Community wellness and social action in the Canadian Arctic: Collective agency as subjective well-being. In L.J. Kirmayer & G. Valaskakis (Eds.), Healing traditions: The mental health of Aboriginal peoples in Canada (pp. 315-334). Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press.
• Kral, M.J., Wiebe, P. Nisbet, K., Dallas, C., Okalik, L., & Enuaraq, N. (2009). Canadian Inuit community engagement in suicide prevention. International Journal of Circumpolar Health, 68, 91-107.
• Kral, M.J. (2008). Psychology and anthropology: Intersubjectivity and epistemology in an interpretive cultural science. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 27, 257-275.
• Kral, M.J., & Idlout, L. (2006). Participatory anthropology in Nunavut. In P.R. Stern & M.E. Stevenson (Eds.), Critical Inuit studies: An anthology of contemporary Arctic ethnography (pp. 54-70). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
• Kidd, S.A., & Kral, M.J. (2005). Practicing participatory research. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52, 187-195.

Classes Recently Taught:

• Prior to coming to UIUC in 2006 I have taught courses on Inuit culture (Yale), rural community psychology (Lakehead), and clinical assessment, cultural psychology, community psychology, qualitative methods, and adulthood & aging (Windsor).
• At UIUC I have taught/teach graduate classes on suicide, ethnography & fieldwork, collaborative community ethnography, and culture & mental illness/health, and an undergraduate course on suicide.