Bio

Andrea is a Quechua-descendent Peruvian PhD Candidate and holds a MSc. from the University of British Columbia. She has a B.Sc. in Forest Sciences and a specialization in Management, Quality and Environmental Auditing from Peru’s National Agrarian University of La Molina. Andrea has been invited by Asheeninka and Yine community members to form an alliance to conduct community-lead projects to elaborate research-based suggestions that address community members’ historical and current concerns and desired futures to influence public policies that affect the Peruvian Amazon.

Andrea is part of a pluri-cultural research team, which is also formed by Yine and Asheeninka community members. The research team is using Indigenous theories and methodologies in a power-shared research. Our current project aims to inform and transform current ideas and praxis of “mutual respect” in public policies and programs which are strongly influenced by western-based paradigms. We propose instead to incorporate a practice of intercultural respect.

Project

The theories of respect embedded in international policies are dominantly defined by 18th-century ideas proposed by Kant—who continues to be the principal referent in modern thought about respect—which later are “copy-pasted” onto the myriad Indigenous contexts, generating violent conflicts. Asheeninka and Yine Peoples argue that their conceptions and practices of (what is articulated in the dominant language as) “respect” exceed those articulated by hegemonic societies.

During my residence in Faber, I will focus on processing (transcribing and coding) the conversational interviews from our project’s second phase called “co-creation and articulation of knowledges” to address our first research question.