Research as Kin-making: Expansive Learning through Indigenous and Ecological Praxis

• In Event: Formative Interventions from the Global South: Expansive Learning as Justice-Oriented Educational Praxis

Abstract

Objectives
In this paper, we reimagine education research as a collective, ecological, and transformative practice—what we refer to as research as kin-making (Author, 2025). We explore how historically minoritized communities, through their engagements with land, ancestry, and collective labor, enact expansive forms of learning that challenge dominant educational paradigms rooted in capitalist individualism and epistemic extractivism. The central objective is to analyze these learning processes through the lens of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as re-mediated, object-oriented activity systems grounded in ancestral epistemologies and planetary care.
Theoretical Framework
We draw on third-generation CHAT (Cole, 1996; Engeström & Sannino, 2010), integrating it with Indigenous epistemologies, posthumanist ecology, and historical materialism. Our work foregrounds contradictions within and between activity systems (e.g., schooling, environmental defense, and ancestral care) and examines how communities engage in expansive learning to negotiate and reconfigure those contradictions. Learning is theorized as a process of transforming the object of collective activity from extractive models of development rooted in capitalist necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019) to relational and regenerative modes of being. The concept of knotworking (Engeström, 2008) informs how multi-generational, multi-species, and multi-institutional actors come together in dynamic coalitions of action and meaning making.
Methods
We employed formative interventionist methodologies with indigenous communities in the Amazon in Brazil and the Midwestern United States, and used long-term, community-engaged ethnography as a mode of inquiry. These interventions aim to support participants in identifying systemic contradictions, collaboratively modeling alternative activity systems, and testing new practices through cycles of reflection and action (Freire, 1981).
Data Sources
Our data come from two multi-year, community-based projects: (1) Environmental Guardians from Riverside Communities in the Brazilian Amazon, and (2) the Indigenous Learning Lab in an Anishinaabe Nation. Data sources include transcripts from planning meetings and learning events, fieldnotes, community artifacts (e.g., ancestral mandalas, forest pedagogy rituals), and visual documentation. These data reflect transformations in the shared object of activity, from fragmented, institutionally imposed goals to collective efforts aimed at sustaining cultural and ecological systems.
Results and/or Substantiated Conclusions or Warrants for Arguments
In both projects, we observed cycles of expansive learning through which contradictions between state education systems and Indigenous lifeways, as well as between capitalist development and ancestral ecological stewardship, were surfaced, analyzed, and transformed. Participants generated new models of education rooted in kinship, reciprocity, and interdependence with land and more-than-human life (e.g., “knowledge and flavors” of the Amazon). These models emerged not as ideal blueprints but as situated, iterative practices of world-making. Our findings extend CHAT by demonstrating how object formation in activity systems can be grounded in Indigenous cosmologies and interspecies entanglements, not merely in institutional goals.
Significance
This paper contributes to CHAT by advancing a decolonial and ecological expansion of object-oriented activity theory. It demonstrates how CHAT can serve not only to analyze contradictions but also to support collective healing, futurity, and relational accountability in contexts of colonial and ecological devastation. In line with the AERA 2026 theme, re-grounding education research in histories of struggle and practices of kin-making offers a vital path forward for addressing global polycrises and imagining just educational futures.

Authors

• Aydin Bal, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Inny Accioly, Universidade Federal Fluminense