My research explores how Indigenous knowledges have been engaged, framed, and contested within global environmental discourses since the late 20th century. Focusing on the period from the 1970s to the present, my PhD project investigates how institutions, scholars, and policy frameworks have conceptualized Indigenous knowledge in relation to Western scientific traditions.
With a theoretical anchor in the notion of epistemic injustice, I examine discursive and conceptual tensions that emerge in efforts to pluralize environmental knowledge forms. Bringing together intellectual history, science and technology studies (STS), environmental humanities, and the philosophy of science, my project is structured around a series of historical and conceptual case studies.
These include the early uptake of Indigenous knowledge in UNESCO and development anthropology in the 1970s-1980s, the debate on the "Ecological Indian" trope in the 1990s and early 2000s, the role of Indigenous epistemologies in the Rights of Nature movement, and recent efforts by bodies like IPBES and IPCC to integrate Indigenous knowledge into global assessments. My work aims to shed light on the politics of knowledge underlying calls for epistemological diversity in the environmental sciences and in political arenas broadly since the late 1980s.
I have given guest lectures on the history of climate ideas - the differences between the local and the global scale, and on the relation between science and Indigenous knowledge; on newer approaches to the history of nature ideas, and on Donna Haraway's scholarship broadly, i.e. bridging recent eco-philosophical excursions and her earlier work within the history of science.
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