Reimagining Collaboration: Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge in a Time of Climate Crisis

A new direction for collaborative climate science, grounded in Indigenous concepts of togetherness, sharing, and generative convergenceAcross universities, labs, NGOs, and public agencies, collaboration has become a compulsory virtue, especially in climate and environmental science.Many such partnerships with Indigenous communities, however, are largely performative, with Indigenous participation merely tokenistic.These collaborations are often rushed by funding cycles, shaped by prestige hierarchies, and organized so that Indigenous expertise is consulted, extracted, or translated into “data,” while scientific agendas stay largely unchanged.In Reimagining Collaboration, social anthropologist Olga Ulturgasheva offers a new analytic and practical model for collaborative climate science: coupling, a deliberate, mediated convergence of distinct knowledge traditions that does not erase difference but uses it to generate new capacities for action. Ulturgasheva emphasizes the importance of t