Caminatas as intergenerational participatory research with more-than-human worlds

• In Event: Coastal communities in Latin America: Honoring children’s everyday sensemaking of changing lands and waters

Proposal

Human relationships with Land have become increasingly visible in global discussions of climate change, biodiversity, human health, and food systems. Yet, the active, living presence of Land as actor and teacher is regularly excluded from most designs of climate research, teaching, and learning. This explicit erasure of the livingness of place in our educational offering are ongoing ways that settler colonialism continues to perpetuate Indigenous erasure and structure problematic nature-culture divides (Bang et al., 2012; Simpson, 2014).
By Land, we mean histories and geologic configurations (e.g. rivers, rocks, plants, humans, city lots), as well as space - the underlying ethics, principles, priorities, philosophies, and embodied and spiritual ways of being (Styres, 2017, p. 49). In this way, Land includes various histories that explicitly attends to Indigenous presence and relationality. From Indigenous perspectives, all life emerges from Land. Land is an interlocutor, theorist, strategist, co-designer of the interconnectedness of life. Land/water/skies hold memories of multigenerational Indigenous narratives, sociopolitical accounts, and dynamic intellectual systems that emerge from life on Land.
This paper examines caminatas comunitarias as a kind of intergenerational land-based participatory research that actively challenges traditional power dynamics and knowledge hierarchies often present in academic research. By participation we mean coastal families repositioned as knowledge keepers and generators in ways that challenge settled assumptions and hegemonic relations of power on whose knowledge counts (Ozer et al., 2020).

We aim to uncover the ways in which more-than-human (MTH) actors are key partners in how humans, especially children, perceive and make sense of their changing lands and water. We are particularly interested in how we can methodologically make visible the ways they walk, read, and story (Marin & Bang, 2018) and interact with Land to create and pass on knowledge. We focus on how caminatas as participatory research practice serves as an approach to explore the role of MTH actors as critical partners in teaching, learning, and ethical development.

This paper draws on videodata collected by researchers and community participants in Chiapas, Mexico during community storywalks. Data was segmented into episodes and coded through an iterative process. Particularly important was the inclusion of land as interlocutor. We conducted interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to explore how children read and respond to more-than-human actors and the processes by which they create knowledge in conversation with Land as interlocutor.

Findings show that Land is an essential actor in supporting children’s agency in learning, community participation, and collective wellbeing, as well as an interlocutor and an equal partner in knowledge development and community preservation. Data shows that intergenerational passing of traditional and ancestral knowledge and children’s ethical development and concern for environmental and collective wellbeing take place in active conversation with the natural world.

Community members as researchers and storywalk leaders allowed for community practices and ethical decisions to emerge naturally through the caminatas, showing Land’s integral role in children’s development across time. Findings highlight the importance of developing an intergenerational participatory methodology aligned with Indigenous ways of knowing and being in relation with the natural world.

Authors

• Maria Cecilia Schwedhelm, Independent Scholar

• Erma Fetić Mujić, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

• Giselle Caretto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• * Meixi, University of Minnesota