Short Abstract

This panel explores how Indigenous Knowledge Systems and local innovations in the Global South challenge Eurocentric futures thinking. We seek contributions engaging with decolonial, community-driven approaches that re-imagine resilience as collective and relational in shaping inclusive futures.

Description

Amid global issues like climate change and biodiversity loss, digital inequity, and socio-political instability, the ability to conceive and create resilient futures is an urgent shared task. However, mainstream paradigms of futures thinking often remain rooted in Eurocentric models of technological determinism. This panel seeks to explore how Indigenous knowledge Systems and forms of local innovations in the Global South, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, offer alternative frameworks for re-envisioning resilience. Drawing from decolonial theories and participatory approaches, the panel examines how Indigenous ecological knowledge systems and community-based and driven techniques of technological adaptation can integrate into pluralistic and relational modes of future-making. Hence, the panel sees ethnographically grounded case studies outlining Indigenous ideas of time, environment, and interdependence in stark contrast to Western anticipatory logics that see futures as remaining firmly planted in predictions and control. “Decolonizing futures” as portrayed here, seeks to reframe resilience not as an action or process of reactivity or adaptation, but a collective, ecological and situated practice found in history, culture, and ethics. Through a focus on lived experience and epistemic contributions from Indigenous and local communities the paper engages with the emerging literatures on futures literacy, offering avenues to advance anticipatory governance in a more inclusive and contextually grounded manner. In line with the conference theme, this panel develops the idea of "more-than-now" by positioning resilient futures in ongoing struggles against coloniality and in the living, evolving epistemologies of communities long-oriented towards futures otherwise. We are interested in contributions, either theoretically or empirically, that engages with community-driven innovation, ecological knowledge, or decolonial methodologies that re-imagines resilience as collective, situated, and relational. The panel encourages interdisciplinary discussion on how the decolonization of futures can reshape anticipatory governance and open up new horizons of futures literacy to imagine futures beyond Western futures thinking.

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