HISTORY

OPS-Alaska has its roots in the investigative reportage and consulting activities of Marilyn Dudley-Rowley beginning in 1977. Dudley-Rowley had separated from active duty in the United States Army the year before and had gone to work for various Alaskan affiliates of Mutual Broadcasting. Her interest in Alaska public lands legislation began to emerge at radio station KRXA, in the Gulf of Alaska town of Seward, where she was contracted out as news director and where she began to lay the groundwork for the large net of professional associates that OPS-Alaska now enjoys.

From Seward, she transferred to Fairbanks where she worked out of station KIAK. With the program director of that radio station, she began Totem Productions to handle the overflow of media production that Fairbanks radio and television facilities were not able to handle in the booming Trans-Alaska Pipeline start-up environment. Soon after, owing to her investigative reportage of the reform movement that cross-cut the Alaska pipeline unions, she was next recruited by a number of federal task forces to investigate several issues relating to federal law enforcement and national security that were linked to activities of those unions and their memberships. When her business partner left Alaska, she renamed Totem Productions Rowley Media Services and continued to assist several federal agencies between 1978-1983. Commercial clientele were still served with media production and public relations services. Federal work was mainly of an investigatory nature, requiring a great deal of field research and participant observation among the groups targeted by the federal task forces. Rowley Media Services also donated products and services to clientele in the Alaska community, as in the re-election of Congressman Don Young and various projects on behalf of various programs and institutes of the University of Alaska.

In 1980, Dudley-Rowley co-founded the Institute of Alaskan Affairs to undertake more scholarly, scientific, and educational projects that were being demanded by clientele. The Institute became the non-profit twin to the for-profit Rowley Media Services and the two organizations joint-ventured on a number of projects. In that year, Dudley-Rowley, along with two other members from the Alaska Chapter of National Press Women, co-authored the book manuscript, Alaska – Energy Lands. The manuscript’s galleys were ordered in volume by the U.S. Congress and were used in the tailoring of Alaska public lands legislation that became a model of public lands legislation in Western and Pacific Northwest states.

By 1981, Rowley Media Services and the Institute of Alaskan Affairs had been recruited to sponsor and negotiate for the rescue and relocation of the Kirghiz Afghans, a group that had originated in southern Siberia but had become indigenous to Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor. By 1982, Dudley-Rowley and associates, acting as a transnational organization, enabled the first mass refugee airlift of Afghans following the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. A substantial portion of the Wakhan Corridor’s population was relocated to the Lake Van region of Turkey in the course of that project.

In the mid-80s, the media production and public relations apparatuses of Rowley Media Services were sold off to a marketing associate in the Fairbanks area. The research apparatus continued on for a time under the Institute of Alaskan Affairs and the for-profit firm Marilyn Dudley-Rowley & Associates. The projects undertaken during the mid-80s through 1989 had a natural science focus. They assisted the UAF’s Institute of Arctic Biology and its members in a number of its projects. Specifically, they were interested in the relationship between reindeer/caribou and human populations and in questions of physical anthropology, like the endocrinological interface between the individual and his/her environment. They began to use space products, specifically in the realm of NASA and NOAA satellite imagery and aerial photography. Dudley-Rowley & Associates mapped shoaling zones in the Arctic Ocean shelf seas through satellite thermal infrared imagery, making some new discoveries. They made and tested inferences about whale migratory routes and Arctic populations. They discovered and mapped over a hundred archaeological sites along the Alaska littoral from Cape Prince of Wales to Camden Bay. And, they were the first to point out the resemblance of some Mars watercourse features to Arctic processes of catastrophic permafrost melting. However, unable to obtain funds from NASA to expand the latter research, Dudley-Rowley & Associates turned their focus on the interaction between environment and society that some of their projects had as a feature. In time, this led to Dudley-Rowley becoming a doctoral student of Patrick D. Nolan at The University of South Carolina (Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology, Patrick Nolan and Gerhard Lenski).

In 1991, Dudley-Rowley & Associates were involved in combining GIS and statistical technologies in designing a project to offer the Government of Kuwait a national record for an international tribunal to sanction Iraq for personal and organizational atrocities committed during the Gulf War. Members of the Associates included many members from The USC Department of Sociology. Their effort sparked the United Nations’ attempts to create a database in this regard.

The Associates began an interest in the symbolic interactionist theoretic approach in sociology and social psychology around 1992 that was manifested, for example, in an interest in the community response to the Exxon Valdez disaster and American long-haul trucking. These venues are related to extreme environments, and then, in 1995, they broke into the area of space engineering human factors, and a new vista was added to Dudley-Rowley’s professional network, gaining new associates and reuniting old ones in new ways. In that year, Dudley-Rowley made connections with personnel at NASA-Johnson Space Center, specifically in the area of Space Shuttle and International Space Station human factors engineering standards.

In 1997, the Associates became OPS-Alaska, and that firm began gaining a reputation for addressing the lack of research in the psychosocial human factors of extreme environments (OPS = "Oceanic, Polar, and Space"). Such research is an absolute must in the consideration of long-duration space missions or in situations where personnel from different cultures are teamed in joint operations, as in peacekeeping missions. In that year, OPS-Alaska made a connection with the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) in relation to its Mars mission research. In 1998, OPS-Alaska procured a substantial National Science Foundation grant for the study of the link between deviance, dysfunction, and conflict and crew size, composition, and time in extreme environmental teams. It continued its association with the IBMP. In 1999, Dudley-Rowley made a connection with personnel at NASA-Ames Research Center. On 3 December 1999, Dudley-Rowley became the first sociology/experimental social psychologist to be included in the active application files of the NASA Astronaut Mission Specialist Candidate Program. In that year, she also became associated with the Design Engineering Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and its relatively new AeroSpace Architecture group.

By 2001, OPS-Alaska was actively attempting to expand the federal engineering standards of the space shuttle and International Space Station. It had become an advocate for a comprehensive vision of human factors that includes the human-technology, human-environment, and human-human interfaces. That effort continues, as do projects that continue to study the correlation between deviance/dysfunction/conflict and crew size, composition, and time in extreme environmental teams. It also retains an interest in the endocrinological interface between the individual and environment, in the interaction between technology and society, in socio-political matters, and in the transnationalization processes of terror and oppression. The company actively seeks multidisciplinary researchers to team with who can successfully mix research methodologies to answer basic and applied research questions.

When viewed from a distance, the pattern of OPS-Alaska's interests advocates for an expansion of the human ecology.