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Entangling Indigenous Knowledges in Universities (EDGES)

Indigenous knowledges are crucial for coping with current global crises, such as climate change, loss of biocultural diversity and rise of xenophobic nationalisms. This pivotal historical moment requires multi-centred thinking and action, bringing together the multiplicity of Indigenous and academic expertise. Universities and academia are critically important in developing knowledge, education, and policy directives. Consequently, EDGES adopts those significant arenas to respectfully advance innovative, collaborative methodologies and new strategies for the entanglement of Indigenous knowledges in research, teaching and policy-making institutions. While there have been efforts to foster dialogue with Indigenous knowledges, these experiences remain elusive, local and not structurally transformative, as the shortcomings of multiculturalism and interculturality have demonstrated. How can we question the existing frameworks and develop new and effective entanglements of knowledges that draw from different epistemologies?

EDGES addresses this question through six different analytical layers with the significant participation of Indigenous academic researchers and the active collaboration of Indigenous intellectuals and experts. To accomplish this endeavour, EDGES creates a future sustainable and disciplinary diverse network of more than 150 researchers from 18 European and American universities, one SME and one NGO. The project contributes to a pluralist and multi-scale approach to knowledge production, research and dissemination through symposiums, workshops, mini-courses, open-access scientific publications, policy recommendations and social media. It will provide critical tools for universities, schools and communities to foster critical dialogue with Indigenous peoples and other cultural minorities by entangling Indigenous knowledges into university curricula and praxis, contributing to the education of future generations, improving policies and science renewal.

The project asks how the frictions between Indigenous knowledges and scientific knowledge, critical for understanding environmental relations and dynamics, may be brought into symmetrical discourse to include plural epistemologies and move beyond the pitfalls of multicultural recognition. This project will focus on the distinctly relational Indigenous conception of environmental relations, resulting in socio-ecological epistemologies and practices and their entanglements with scientific ecological knowledge. We will ask how the land, the territory, and its components are conceptualized and on what basis relations with and interventions into these components are undertaken. How are these relations and conceptions memorized, transformed, revitalized, transmitted, gendered and applied to translocally emerging ecological issues? Specifically, what is the epistemological relevance of gender to the notion of body-territory? We explore these knowledges not just as local alternatives to an increasingly globalized world, but as contributions to new terrestrial groundings and ways of knowing and being that can be articulated in different contexts and scales to reconstitute and reassemble sustainable pluralized futures.