Indigenous Futurities and Collective Continuance: New possibilities for educational research

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Collaborations to (Re)Imagine Critical Studies in Education: Working Towards New Visions for Education Research

Abstract

Indigenous futurities and collective continuance offer powerful responses to the authoritarian pressures that seek to erase histories, deny science, and control knowledge production in higher education. These frameworks resist erasure by grounding research in ancestral memory, land-based practices, and intergenerational responsibility—prioritizing community-defined goals over institutional agendas. Rather than retreating into neutrality, they call scholars to be accountable to histories of colonialism and to actively sustain Indigenous life, language, and governance in the face of state and institutional control. By centering Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, we learn that knowledge is not disembodied or value-neutral—it is relational, place-based, and deeply tied to responsibilities to land and community. These diverse wisdoms offer methodological alternatives to extractive, linear, and colonial research paradigms. They teach us to slow down, to listen, and to imagine research not as a means of control but as a practice of collective care. Together, Indigenous futurities and collective continuance urge us to build futures in which education research is deeply ethical, creative, and liberatory. These visions move beyond inclusion toward transformation—where higher education becomes a site of resurgence, cultural survival, and radical possibility, rather than compliance with settler logics of power. This paper will focus on conversations between myself and graduate students in our Cultural Studies and Social Thought in Education program around how we can use the theoretical frameworks of Indigenous futurities and collective continuance as we reimagine our program and grow into something new in spite of and because of the challenging times within which we are living.

Author

• Stephany RunningHawk Johnson, Washington State University