Winter School: Being Indigenous

This year´s winter school is a follow-up of the two week hybrid workshop in January with our partners in Kirgistan, Spain, and Scotland. A team of 40 students will be for one week at the Campus of the GSA Innovation School to explore existing and possibly new concepts of indigenity. We will relate the concepts of place, heritage, knowledge, practise and focus on different on ways of sharing experiences  and interactions we will create in the environment of the campus site.

We are aware of the ubiquity of the term “indigenous” – always as an unchallenged positive term, measured against an unfailingly problematic non-indigenous, circulatory, imperial/colonial and capitalist (binary) other. We can all bring to minds images of “indigenous” people(s), usually based upon their relation to time, space and technology. That is, they appear technologically “primitive,” and from a place or geography far from our own (either in space or time/custom). Based on new notions of Human-Environment Interactions, we will explore what might indigenous mean for us, now and here, the citizens of now/here…