Global Indigeneity: How the world is 'going native'

Professor Jane Jacobs and Dr Jan Penrose

This project invites students to examine the range of social and cultural formations by which people claim indigeneity. These originally localized processes are increasingly mediated through, and intensified by, global structures and processes (the internet, global political alliances, global bio-technologies of kinship and genealogy). The study would develop ways of investigating these globalised dimensions of indigeneity, and seek to explore the extent to which new constructions of indigeneity invest in, or rely upon, a return to ‘nature’ and/or ‘nation’ (through, for example, primordial claims, certain notions of ecological knowledge, and kinship).