Encounters across Indigenous, scientific, and metatheoretical knowledge systems: from appropriation toward reciprocity? A roundtable

The stewardship of planetary ecosystems increasingly hinges on emancipatory Indigenous, scientific, and metatheoretical knowledge systems. However, critical realists have engaged with Indigenous knowledge only in limited and scattered ways. This roundtable brings together critical realist scholars working with Indigenous communities in Canada, South Africa, and Australia in order to offer a space for reflecting on the tensions and challenges that arise when these ways of knowing encounter one another. The discussion highlights the complexities of moving away from the appropriation and suppression of Indigenous knowledge toward reciprocity between Indigenous, scientific, and metatheoretical perspectives. The convergence between critical realist conceptual resources, such as the concrete universal and the three domains of reality, and Indigenous practices and epistemologies, including Ubuntu, Mi’kmaq Two-Eyed Seeing, and the uthuthu ceremony, anchors the contributions brought together in this roundtable.