• Munya Saruchera (Director at African Centre for Inclusive Health Management, Stellenbosch Univesity)
• Sostina Spiwe Matina (African Centre for Migration and Society, Wits University) – sipmartina@gmail.com

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. We invite contributions that examine how metaphysical memory—ancestral, ecological, and embodied—can inform contemporary struggles for healing, belonging, and sustainability across the Global South.

Amid ecological collapse and social fragmentation, communities continue to mobilise ancestral cosmologies, ritual practices, and relational ethics to restore balance between humans, land, and the metaphysical world. These practices—often maintained and transmitted through migration, kinship, and diasporic networks—challenge linear notions of “progress” by centring reciprocity, interdependence, and collective care.

We seek to create a dialogical and participatory space for scholars, practitioners, healers, artists, and community knowledge holders to share how ancestral epistemologies shape visions of justice, well-being, and regeneration.

We particularly welcome abstracts 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 ritual and embodied methodologies as forms of knowledge production.
• Explore ecological, spiritual, and communal responses to capitalist and climate crises.

Guiding Question: How might reclaiming metaphysical memory and ancestral knowledge aid collective reawakening towards futures of justice, care, and ecological harmony?

Format and Planned Activities

The Working Group will combine:

• Paper presentations (10–12 minutes each)
• Roundtable discussions with Indigenous practitioners and community-based researchers
• Dialogical and storytelling sessions exploring embodied and ritual knowledge
• Collaborative reflection workshop to synthesise key insights into a shared statement on “Regenerative Futures from the South”

Submission Guidelines

Abstract length: up to 300 words

Submission deadline: 30 November 2025

Notification of acceptance: 8 December 2025

Submission email: metaphysicalmemory.devdays2026@gmail.com

Full papers are not required; participants may submit conceptual, experiential, or practice-based abstracts.