This working group explores how Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and ancestral healing practices offer regenerative alternatives to the constraints of colonial and neoliberal development paradigms. The group invites contributions from any indigenous communities involved in similar forms of epistemic and spiritual reclamation. The group examines how metaphysical memory can inform contemporary approaches to ecological, social, and spiritual renewal.
Within the ruins of extractive capitalism, communities continue to mobilise ancestral epistemologies, ritual practices, and cosmologies of kinship to restore balance between humans, land, and the metaphysical world. Such practices, often enacted by migrants and mobile populations, challenge linear notions of progress by offering relational understandings of healing, belonging, and sustainability.
Across different regions, communities continue to mobilise ancestral cosmologies, ritual practices, and relational ethics to restore balance between human life, land, water, and the metaphysical world. Such practices reshape dominant ideas of progress by emphasising interdependence, reciprocity, and embodied memory. They also highlight how forms of healing, i.e., spiritual, ecological, emotional, and communal, are enacted within contexts shaped by displacement, migration, and structural neglect.
This working group draws from decolonial, feminist, and ecological views, viewing Indigenous world-making as both a form of resistance and a model for future regeneration. It invites scholars, practitioners, healers, artists, and storytellers to examine how metaphysical memory and ancestral knowledge influence current struggles for belonging, environmental healing, collective well-being, and alternative futures.
We particularly welcome contributions that:
• engage with Indigenous epistemologies as living, adaptive, and mobile
• examine how healing travels through migration, diaspora, and kinship networks
• theorise regenerative development beyond growth-centric and extractive models
• foreground embodied and ritual methodologies as forms of knowledge production
• explore ecological and spiritual responses to the crises of capitalism and climate collapse
The working group will employ dialogical and participatory approaches, including discussion, storytelling, and embodied inquiry, to collaboratively develop frameworks for reimagining well-being and development from Africa and the Global South.
Guiding question: How might reclaiming metaphysical memory and ancestral knowledge aid collective reawakening towards futures of justice, care, and ecological harmony?
Theme: Reclaiming the Cracks: Sites of Hope, Resistance and Alternatives
Format: Working Group (Discussion and Academic Dialogue).
Coordinator(s): Munya Saruchera, PhD, Director at African Centre for Inclusive Health
Management, Stellenbosch, and Sostina Spiwe Matina, PhD, African Centre for Migration and Society, Wits University.