Indigenizing social research methodologies: an analysis of the Diploma Program for Strengthening Indigenous Women’s Leadership (Intercultural Indigenous University and the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology)

Abstract

Based on a description of the learning processes and approaches to teaching research in the Diploma Program for Strengthening Indigenous Women’s Leadership, coordinated by the Indigenous Fund’s Intercultural Indigenous University and the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, we reflect on the “indigenization” of social research and the production of culturally and politically relevant knowledge for the indigenous women’s movement in Latin America. Methodologically, our reflexive comments and thinking about teaching dynamics and student–facilitator interactions are based on our involvement as coordinator and online teacher of the diploma program over a 4-year period (from 2010 to 2013). In particular, our analysis focuses on the context of dispute in which facilitators and leaders in the diploma program came up against the challenge of dismantling the coloniality of knowledge construction when adapting research methods. The students’ fieldwork experiences demonstrate their creativity in adapting and adopting methodologies that allow them to enhance the visibility of indigenous women’s political contributions to local indigenous activism. Mónica Michelena’s fieldwork research took place over a 6-month period in Uruguay in 2010. It was part of a project on the cultural revitalization of the social memory of the Charrúa people, located in the Salsipuedes valley—the scenario of a historical genocide in 1831.