Looking Across Worlds for Environmental Justice: Interrogating Scientifc Practices of Relating to Indigenous Knowledge

What kind of knowledge do we need to understand and counter the devastating environmental and climate crisis? Certainly, we need established scientific knowledge – but this is not enough. Increasingly scholars, policy makers and activists emphasize the importance of other forms of knowledge: those which long have not been accepted as “proper” knowledge because they emerged from colonized and marginalized peoples and groups. In the context of environmental questions, particularly Indigenous knowledge has been celebrated as not only valid but necessary to “save the world”. However, important questions remain unanswered: why do researchers choose certain cases, concepts and conceptualisations? What knowledge does not get amplified and why? How is Indigenous knowledge (trans)formed in global academia? And why do some concepts become relevant for politics while others do not? We want to answer these questions through empirical research. In other words, we want to explore in detail the work of academics that refer to Indigenous environmental knowledge. working with a number of different stakeholders and institutions, including Indigenous communities, academics and academic institutions and international bodies, we will think through these questions together and explore the best ways to collaborate.