Climate Justice and Indigenous Knowledge
10 November 2026 15:00 until 17:00
University of Sussex Campus - Global Studies Resource Centre, Arts C
Speaker: Professor Ngozi Finette Stewart. University of Benin, Nigeria
Part of the series: Faculty Dialogue (Centre for International Education and Sussex Sustainability Research Programme)
Add this event to your calendar
Climate Justice and Indigenous KnowledgesFaculty Dialogue (Centre for International Education and Sussex Sustainability Research Programme)
Professor Ngozi Finette Stewart (Professor of Environmental Law, Policy and Ethics, University of Benin, Nigeria) opens this faculty dialogue addressing the topic 'Whose knowledge counts:: Indigenous Climate Justice in the Lake Chad Basin and the Work of Education. Her presentation (see abstract below) will be followed by comments from the respondent panel, before opening to wider discussion with the audience.
Chair: Dr Gunjan Wadhwa, CIE
Respondents: Professor Jo Alcamo, SSRP and Professor Barbara Crossouard, CIE
Abstract:
| Lake Chad has lost most of its surface area since the 1960s, and the communities who have lived with the lake for generations now face a convergence of ecological loss, insecurity and displacement. Yet the dominant accounts of this crisis in policy, in the academy and in international law, are rarely written by those communities. Drawing on my recent book, Indigenous Climate Justice in the Lake Chad Basin (Springer), this dialogue asks what changes when Indigenous knowledge is treated not as a cultural footnote to climate adaptation, but as a system of law, governance and science in its own right. The presentation will trace how Indigenous practices of natural resource management, conservation, food sovereignty and health have sustained resilience in the Basin, and how gendered experiences of climate change reshape what justice must mean there. It will then turn outward to the question this Faculty Dialogue invites: if knowledge itself has been a site of colonial exclusion, then education is not a neutral bystander to climate injustice but one of its principal mechanisms; and one of its principal remedies. What would curricula, research ethics and university partnerships look like if they took Indigenous epistemologies seriously as co-equal sources of knowledge? Who gets to be an expert, an author, a teacher? These are questions for law, development, sustainability, gender studies and global studies alike, and I hope our discussions together will take them in directions I have not. The aim is less to deliver conclusions than to open a shared conversation about how our disciplines, and our classrooms, might become instruments of climate justice rather than obstacles to it. |