Contemporary characterization of global sustainability has demonstrated that Indigenous worldviews approximate important attributes of sustainable development. In this context, Indigenous epistemology is a crucial component in the selection of the criteria for sustainable development and the formulation of corresponding goals for sustainability in a global economy.

However, the culture of the academy and its politics of educational borderlands have been on the attack as representing knowledge that is encapsulated in positivistic, objective principles, which in retrospect, exclude Indigenous epistemologies. This presentation explores how Indigenous epistemologies and cultural ideas can be grafted onto academic knowledge and technology in a way that considers Indigenous epistemology as crucial in the generation of knowledge for sustainable development.

The presentation attempts to demonstrate the efficacy of participatory research in integrating academic knowledge/technology and Indigenous knowledge by creating a model of knowledge integration that goes beyond Eurocentric positivistic traditions and culture, and encourages a cross-fertilization of insights, practices and worldviews of Indigenous knowledge and cultures with academic knowledge and technology. It concludes that Indigenous knowledge and the traditions of the academy can be mediated and defined in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared values, beliefs and symbols about knowledge in a participatory, collaborative knowledge generation model that emphasizes meaning and mutual exercise of control and power and placing Indigenous knowledge in a conspicuous place in academic knowledge/technology traditions.

You are all welcome to this CR&DALL Seminar, details of which are shown below; please RSVP to [email protected]