Centring Indigenous peoples in knowledge exchange research-practice by resetting assumptions, relationships and institutions

Abstract

Knowledge exchange is a broad and consequential undertaking, analysed by diverse scholars, and rapidly growing as a field of academic practice. Its remit is to strengthen ties between research generators and users to support better material outcomes for society. This review paper considers how this increasingly codified academic field might engage with the research-practice concerns identified in the Indigenous and decolonial literature. We do so by bringing the two literature sets together for analysis, noting they are not mutually exclusive. We reveal how addressing discrimination towards Indigenous peoples from within the knowledge exchange field requires a fundamental reconsideration of the biases that run through the field’s structures and processes. We prioritise two connected framing assumptions for shifting—jurisdictional and epistemological. The first shift requires a repositioning of Indigenous peoples as political–legal entities with societies, territories, laws and customs. The second shift requires engagement with Indigenous expert knowledge seriously on its own terms, including through greater understanding about expert knowledge creation with nature. These shifts require taking reflexivity much further than grasped possible or appropriate by most of the knowledge exchange literature. To assist, we offer heuristic devices, including illustrative examples, summary figures, and different questions from which to start the practice of knowledge exchange. Our focus is environmental research practice in western Anglophone settler-colonial and imperial contexts, with which we are most familiar, and where there is substantial knowledge exchange literature.