By Dr. J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi and Dr. Alejandro Mora Motta

This Argelander Academy brings four postdoctoral scholars to the Global Heritage Lab, two from Nigeria and two from Colombia. It creates a platform for dialogue and seeks to examine and complicate how indigenous/local peoples apply heritage to adapt and often resist extractivism and climate emergencies in Africa and Latin America, which are related to the coloniality of people, culture, and nature. This involves interrogating the democratic regimes and values among indigenous/local communities, questioning how they understand and participate in democracy and how the processes drive governance and environmental justice. We aim to foster transcultural and transdisciplinary conversations on critical heritage research to contribute to a South-South-North dialogue. The Academy seeks to engage in how heritage narratives shape human-nature relationality in contexts in which global issues, such as natural resource extractivism and the climate emergency, threaten indigenous ways of living and existing; their ontologies often involve more-than-human communities and concepts.

Extractive activities continue to impact local forms of tangible and intangible heritage that represent and are being represented by local worldviews or relational ontologies. Despite decades of resistance against extractivism using local narratives, histories, heritage and acts of indigeneity – local practices, regulations, and values – extractive modernism established over-exploitation as the norm that facilitated the emergence of the so-called Anthropocene. This new epoch is understood as a time when both human and non-human beings are threatened by massive resource extraction and climate emergency, presenting us with intermittent drought, flooding, desertification, species extinction, and many more risks. Many indigenous communities rely on the reinvention of themselves and their heritage to bridge the dichotomies between humans and non-humans, culture and nature, matter and mind. We would draw on the comparative experience of Africans and Latin Americans to imagine a pluriversal future where survival is planned beyond extractive modernity, considering the principles of relational ontologies and posthumanism – decentering the placement of humans above other life forms. And we ask, what democratic processes would direct such pluriversal futures?

From left to right: Host Researcher Dr. Alejandro Mora Motta, Argelander Fellows Dr. Thecla Iheoma Akukwe, Dr. Gustavo A. Ortega Guerrero, Host Researcher Dr. J. Kelechi Ugwuanyi, and Argelander Fellows Dr. Judy Marcela Chaves-Agudelo and Dr. Eberechukwu Johnpaul Ihemezie

This project is possible thanks to the Arglander Academy Grants of the Argelander Program of the University of Bonn.