Between 2012-2016 Dr. Oehler worked with Oka-Soiot herder-hunters of the Eastern Saian Mountains of South Central Siberia, where he conducted ethnographic and ethnohistorical research on human-animal relations. His PhD dissertation, entitled “Being Between Beings: Soiot Herder-Hunters in a Sacred Landscape,” explored local notions of the household and its multi-species members, emplaced in a landscape seen as sacred from both shamanist and Buddhist perspectives. His work on human-reindeer, horse, yak, dog, sheep, fish, and wolf relations problematizes conventional notions of 'wild' and 'tame' in the context of a posthumanist anthropology.

From 2009-2012 he conducted community-based research with the Inuvialuit Cultural Resource Centre, the Beaufort-Delta Education Council, and Aurora College. The project focused on the role of human-landscape-language relations in maintaining Inuvialuit (Inuit) cultural identity in the Western Canadian Arctic. His Master's thesis, entitled “Inuvialuit Language and Identity,” explored Inuvialuit language history, its contemporary symbolic meaning, as well as linguistic ideologies that continue to influence the state of ancestral language revitalization in the northern Northwest Territories. He also has an ongoing interest in the material culture of the north.

His teaching spans the four sub-fields of the discipline, ranging from introductory courses in social and medical anthropology to theory courses and special topics and upper division courses, including “Museums, Archives, and Source Communities,” “Environmental Anthropology,” and “Animals in Anthropology.”

Dr. Oehler is currently affiliated with Arctic Domus, a five-year project headed by Prof. David G. Anderson (University of Aberdeen) and funded by the European Research Council (ERC), which investigates “how people and animals today, and in the past, build sustainable communities around the circumpolar Arctic” (www.arcticdomus.org). Previously he was part of the “Northern Colonialism” research program, headed by Prof. Tim Ingold's “The North” theme at the University of Aberdeen, UK (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/the-north/research/).