06/10/2026
At Universität Bayreuth, Day 1 of the Indigenous Knowledges in Focus: Repositioning Environmental Human Rights through Temporality and Relationality project development workshop demonstrated true intellectual provocation on human rights law.
Prof. Dr Thoko Kaime began by raising the questions that formed the basis of everything that followed: when environmental rights are asserted, whose time is being safeguarded? And as for the relationships in question, are only the individual and the state being acknowledged or is the ecosystem itself being recognised? Can the law be brought to accept ways of knowing, including Indigenous knowledge, which it has so frequently regarded as lying outside its scope?
Prof. Dr Almut Schilling-Vacaflor brought the questions down to earth by drawing on many years of field research that she has carried out with Indigenous communities in Latin America; her point about the way that time pressure affects relationships and the fact that the long-term integrity of a territory seldom matches the governance timelines imposed on it laid the foundation for the afternoon's discussion of 'slow consent' and what actual requirements slower project design might have for us.
In between these provocations by Dr Claudia Ituarte-Lima regarding temporality and relationality as open tools rather than fixed concepts and the Methods Labs led by Dr Isabelle Zundel, Prof. Dr Williams Iheme and Héctor Jaime Vinasco, the participants read cases such as Endorois, Sarayaku and KlimaSeniorinnen using doctrinal, temporal-relational and alternative approaches at the same time. Prof. Iheme's observation remained with the group: resistance is not one-dimensional.
To conclude the working day, Professor Philippe Cullet addressed the more difficult issues concerning ethics, data sovereignty, authorship and credit in collaborative research.
Participants from the African, Inter-American, and European human rights systems are collaboratively advancing a project that remains unresolved but open to ongoing redesign.
A joint initiative between African Legal Studies HumanRights @ FAU
