About
Dr. 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 leads 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 what role education can play in addressing social and ecological issues and how to create these changes by addressing structural inequalities. 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 dominant mindset that informs our economic, social, and political systems. This mindset, in turn, creates knowledge that shapes how we view the world, informing our actions.
