About
Nigora Erkaeva (pronouns: she/her/hers) is a postdoctoral researcher for the nonprofit, research-focused environmental organization Southeast Michigan Stewardship (SEMIS) Coalition. As a postdoc, she is leading the Indigenous Ways of Knowing Initiative in SEMIS, which aims to integrate Indigenous wisdom and practices into the school curriculum.
In her research, she focuses on how education has been used to uphold structural inequalities that create social and ecological harm to everyone, especially to land-based and marginalized communities locally and globally. She specifically looks at how knowledge and discourses reproduce each other, creating systems and cultures in which we live through discursive processes. Nigora uses ecojustice, social justice, ecofeminist, place-based, postcolonial and settler colonial theories, and indigenous wisdom to unpack the colonial mindset that informs our economic, social, and political systems. This mindset in turn creates knowledge that shapes the way we view the world informing our actions.
