Session 5

To celebrate this leading African scholar from Botswana and critically engage with her world renowned book, ‘Indigenous Research Methodologies’, this session will use this book by Bagele Chilisa as a starting point to engage with the practical and theoretical implications of indigenising methodologies, specifically for Africa. Critically drawing from the work of Chilisa, papers are invited to engage with her work around but not limited to. Topics that could be covered are: Indigenizing methodologies or Ghettoization of African research? The meaning of ‘indigenous’ methodologies and implications for doing research that celebrates diversity and inclusivity, prospects and challenges in indigenizing methodologies, differences and similarities between decolonizing methodologies and indigenizing methodologies.

ABSTRACTS

1.Critical Conversations on Bagele Chilisa’s Indigenous Research Methodologies

Sethunya Tshepho Mosime  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

Esther Nkhukhu-Orlando  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

To celebrate this leading African scholar from Botswana and critically engage with her world-renowned book, ‘Indigenous Research Methodologies’, this session will use this book by Bagele Chilisa as a starting point to engage with the practical and theoretical implications of indigenising methodologies, specifically for Africa. Critically drawing from the work of Chilisa, papers are invited to engage with her work around but not limited to. Topics that could be covered are: Indigenizing methodologies or Ghettoization of African research? The meaning of ‘indigenous’ methodologies and implications for doing research that celebrates diversity and inclusivity, prospects and challenges in indigenizing methodologies, differences and similarities between decolonizing methodologies and indigenizing methodologies.

2.Participatory Approaches to address Social Cohesion in Sustainability Research

Michael Weinhardt  (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)

Katharina Löhr  (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) e.V., Germany)

Social cohesion is generally seen as a desirable feature of society and widely used as a policy objective. The UNDP specifically have recognized the importance of social cohesion for peace-building and sustainable development. Despite its importance, definitions of the concept as well as ways to measure it vary widely, leaving its contours unclear and open for debate. There seems to be a consensus, however, that different levels are important in understanding social cohesion: from individual attitudes to community relations up to connections at the country level. At the same time, as the conceptions and measurements of social cohesion originated in Western traditions of thought, they may be viewed very differently from the Global South. If the concept is to be applied in a meaningful way in the global discourse and research on sustainable development, it needs further clarification through the integration of diverse perspectives at various levels of society. The paper discusses tools and methods for community and stakeholder involvement in the Global South in order to understand the concept and its impact at the local level, resulting in context-specific conceptions of social cohesion. From a Citizen Science perspective, this amounts to the task of co-creating or co-designing conceptual definitions and measurement indicators for tapping local knowledge and involving the views of non-scientists in the process. This will enable the design of policy interventions to build social cohesion on the local level, the development of community specific indicators to evaluate policy interventions locally, as well as the comparison of social cohesion levels across countries.

3.Relational perspectives and history: Understanding polycentric networks in the Sonoran Desert and the African Great Lakes

Axel Utz  (Independent scholar, USA)

In various regions around the world, such as the Sonoran Desert and the African Great Lakes, small cultures and polities persisted in the face of larger, expanding polities over considerable time periods. Elsewhere, small cultures and polities entirely succumbed to the centralizing forces of larger, hierarchically organized neighbours. I interpret the persistence of small cultures and polities as success rather than failure. Their resilience is testimony to their sophistication. Their knowledge and experience can significantly enhance our understanding of society. Small cultures and polities that persisted in the neighbourhood of larger ones over long periods did not make it on their own. They relied on sophisticated webs of cultural, spiritual, economic, and political exchange systems that connected them to close neighbours and geographically distant partners. We still know little about these polycentric networks because, until quite recently, no scholarly discipline put much effort into researching them (Kusimba and Kusimba 2003, Nelson and Strawhacker 2011). As a historian who studies the connectedness of small cultures in the Sonoran Desert and the African Great Lakes, I rely on evidence from written sources. Many of these were produced by colonialists and are heavily biased. To make this information pertinent to my research, I rely on interpretative concepts derived from other sources ranging from archaeological site reports and ethnographic information to oral histories and upstreaming. Relational epistemologies and research methods as outlined by Bagele Chilisa are ingenious and supportive of my work because they can significantly improve the quality of research, including concepts we use to interpret information contained in textual sources produced by outsiders. In my presentation, I will contribute examples from my research on the historical connectedness of small cultures and polities in both the Sonoran Desert and African Great Lakes from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century.

4.Doing Indigenist Methodology among Indigenous Peoples

Delfo Canceran  (De La Salle University, Philippines)

In doing research to indigenous peoples, scholars who are trained in western scholarship have only used their foreign methodological frameworks and applied their methods on the indigenous peoples in their communities. Instead of helping the indigenous peoples recover their knowledge, they inadvertently reinforce their alienation from their lifeworld, no longer on the conquest of their territorial domains but on the colonization of their cognitive worldviews. In this paper, we shall articulate a methodology sensitive to the situation of the indigenous peoples in their communities. Indigenous scholars who know their communities and worldviews have developed a decolonial methodology and applied it to their research among their peoples. This methodology is skewed on border epistemology appropriate for the indigenous peoples who have been muted and hidden by history. This epistemology gathers or collect knowledge from oral history such as storytelling in their community through attentive and careful listening to their questions in life. Decolonial methodology does not dislodge the western methodology but interfaces them together but prioritizes the indigenous knowledge in research. We call it indigenist methodology because it takes its starting point from the indigenous peoples’ knowledge. This indigenist methodology is a political struggle linked with the self-determination and self-representation of the indigenous peoples of their worldviews. Since colonization has deprived them of their self-representation, indigenous methodology would reclaim that right by articulating and asserting their worldviews. To construct that indigenous knowledge, indigenist methodology uses interdisciplinary approaches that advance the decolonization process that prioritizes the indigenous knowledge and in effect, critiques western knowledge. Moreover, this methodology also proposes a teamwork research composed of leaders from their People’s Organizations (POs), representatives from their Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and scholars from the academe for collaborative production of knowledge. In this teamwork, the indigenous knowledge is the privileged resource for research. As the indigenous communities reclaim their rights to self-representation, scholars are challenged to engage with self-reflexivity learning from the indigenous peoples. Scholars should recruit and train prospective indigenous researchers in doing field research so that they would appreciate their own knowledge and flourish their cultural heritage. They need to heed the indigenous peoples and critique each other in knowledge production. They should work together to rescue the indigenous worldview and promote the indigenous knowledge.

5.Lessons on Indigeneity from Teaching and Learning

Caitlin Mapitsa  (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)

Indigenous Research Methodologies has formed an important part of the curriculum in four courses on evaluation and research methodologies that I have taught over the last 3 years. Each student cohort, to a global group of 400 evaluation professionals, to a group of 35 South African civil servants, have grappled with different components of understanding and applying the lessons of Indigenous Research Methodologies in these diverse contexts. This paper will explore some of the common tensions, areas of consensus and contextual variations in how the teachings have been received and understood by students.