Indigenous Knowledge, Social Solidarity, and Global Uncertainty: Negotiating Everyday Practices In Global–Local Contexts

The contemporary world is characterised by a multitude of overlapping uncertainties, including climate change, conflict over political space, economic instability, technological advances, and increasing social inequalities. In this environment, indigenous knowledge systems and locally embedded forms of social solidarity have taken on renewed importance as people strive to make sense of and adapt to rapid changes in their social reality resulting from increased global interconnectedness. It has created new challenges for the preservation, recognition, and transmission of indigenous knowledge and collective ways of living.

This session welcomes submissions that reflect upon how indigenous knowledge systems and social solidarity are produced, maintained, altered, or deployed under conditions of global uncertainties, specifically, the relationships between local practices and global processes, focusing on how communities utilise cultural traditions, ecological knowledge, kinship networks, shared memories, and customary institutions to engage with current issues. The session will focus on critical examination of the negotiations, adaptations, and tensions that arise when local knowledge systems come into contact with state policy initiatives, market pressures, international development efforts, digital technologies, and global governance structures, and the practical actions of individuals and communities who develop resilience, belonging, co-operation, and collective action through daily routines. The themes include indigenous self-governance, social cohesion, community reactions to crises, revitalisation of culture, and indigenous knowledge as a source of sustainable futures.