Flocking to Transform Lives in Inequality: Including Evidence-Based Indigenous Knowledge in Inclusive Education Agendas

ABSTRACT This article uses the case of Afrocentric knowledge on resilience to argue for the presence of indigenous knowledge into inclusive education agendas to enable transformation in highly unequal spaces. The premise is that local, indigenous knowledge serves as evidence of effective and efficient buffering against inequality that gives insight into low-threshold options for transformation. When people are disproportionally structurally at risk they have limited access to resources and their potential to thrive is limited - as is the case in emerging economy contexts. Ironically, although the need for transformation is highest in extremely unequal contexts, knowledge from the Global South and emerging economies remain underrepresented in global discourses on development. Rather, development agendas and mechanisms (including for inclusive education) are grounded in Eurocentric and Global North notions of change, inclusion, wellbeing, resource distribution, and service delivery. Indigenous knowledge provides evidence of how, intergenerationally, people push towards available resources as a way to draw on limited resources and promote inclusive, positive development for many. The article uses the evidence from an Afrocentric indigenous psychology theory, Relationship Resourced Resilience, to posit the use of indigenous knowledge in inclusive education to enable transformation in response to hardship that promotes inclusive, collective wellbeing.