CLAS Lecture Series: "Indigenous Movements and the Biocultural Paradigm in Latin America: The Experience of the Christensen Fund"

Long-standing indigenous movements in Latin America have increasingly embraced biocultural diversity and related systems-thinking paradigms from inter-disciplinary science as ways to communicate - and mobilize international backing for - their holistic approach to sustaining and adapting their lands, lifeways and rights.  The Christensen Fund, a global funder in the biocultural realm, has been a part of this process, which has in part contributed (far beyond the Christensen Fund) to the unprecedented success of these movements globally over the last decade.  This lecture will explore the concept, its deployment, its discontents, and the pointers provided by the example of biocultural diversity for potent collaborations between indigenous and local peoples and a new generation of scientists.

Ken Wilson serves as Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Christensen Fund. He joined in August 2002 as Christensen’s first non-family Executive Director and to refocus their mission around biocultural diversity.  Born in Malawi with a life spread rather across the world, Ken studied zoology at the University of Oxford and anthropology at University College London where his doctorate focused on indigenous knowledge, health and human ecology in the agro-pastoral arid savannahs and woodlands of Southern Zimbabwe.  During those years as an ethno-biologist he was particularly interested in linking participatory research on ecological histories with community-based landscape management. He then took a Research Officer position at the University of Oxford in the Refugee Studies Programme.

More about Dr. Ken Wilson and The Christensen Fund can be found here.