Interpretive flexibility in the Kayapó Indigenous Territories: 25 years of innovative international education and sustainable development partnerships

• In Event: Environmental and Sustainability SIG Highlighted Session: Educating beyond the human: Reconsidering the purpose and practice of international education in complex socio-ecological systems

Proposal

This presentation is one piece of a larger research project investigating the structure, processes, and outcomes of the different actors within the “Pinkaiti Partnership,” a research and education based international partnership with the A’Ukre Kayapó in the Brazilian Amazon. Since 1992, A’Ukre has worked with an international network of example of how different actor groups interact to design, implement and evaluate research and education programs within Indigenous communities.
The research uses the concept of boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Star and Bowker, 1992; Star, 2010) to investigate the partnership. Boundary objects are a useful conceptual tool for understanding collaborative work where there is not consensus among actors. According to the authors boundary objects generally have 4 components: interpretive flexibility, standardized routines and procedures, ambiguous work, and “tacking” between actors.
This presentation focuses specifically on the interpretive flexibility within the design and implementation of the partnership. Interpretive flexibility is the concept “that… artifacts (in this case Pinkaiti and the field course) are both culturally constructed and interpreted… flexibility is manifested in how people think of or interpret artifacts as well as how they design them (Bijker, Hughes & Pinch,1987, p. 40; (Meyer & Schulz-Schaeffer, 2006). In this presentation, I will use interpretive flexibility as an analytic framework for conceptualizing “educating beyond the human.”
I used an embedded case study approach (Yin, 2014) to look at each actor group as a unit of analysis. Data comes from more than 100 interviews were conducted between February and August 2019 with the researchers, students, government and NGO officials involved in the partnership in one way or another since 1992. Between June and September 2019, I spent 80 days in the A’Ukre community interviewing community members and watching the community prepare, implement and take the course. This presentation presents the analyses of these interviews and observations.
The results include a preliminary discussion of how different actors interpreted or currently interpret the “work” of the partnership and the institutions of their partner organizations. The research brings together almost 30 years of various cultural, linguistic, disciplinary, and institutional perspectives. The research offers insights both across the programs partners as well insights gleaned during a quarter century of collaborations.

Author

• Matthew Aruch, University of Maryland