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Can AI Support Territorial Futures?
A keynote and conversation on community-directed climate adaptation, generative AI, and transdisciplinary collaboration
- Monday, September 21, 2026
- 9:00 AM - 10:45 AM: Keynote from Dr. Elizabeth Sumida Huaman
- 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM: Conversation about community-directed AI
- WIRB 3000
Dr. Sumida Huaman’s keynote will ground a conversation about the emerging CARDINALS research program on Community-Directed AI for Territorial Futures. Following her talk, we will consider what role, if any, AI might appropriately play in supporting community-defined priorities for territorial stewardship, climate adaptation, and educational sovereignty.
KEYNOTE
"Rooted in Relation: Co-Producing Ecological Research with Indigenous Communities"
Dr. Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, University of Minnesota
ABSTRACT
In 2021, as Covid waxed and waned across the globe, at a small Andean school in the Sacred Valley of Cusco, Peru, Quechua children gradually began returning to in-person classes. An early childhood teacher recalled observing their dynamics, including that “they didn’t know how to play anymore.” During the pandemic, learners of all ages manipulated mobile phones and laptops that took on new roles—from instruments of mainstream socialization to required learning devices and whose raw materials are mined from the Tawantinsuyo (the four quarters of Inka territories) and other Indigenous lands. For millennia, Andean and other Indigenous peoples have defined and worked technology as part of their environment, and since at least the colonial era, they have negotiated tools and resources to survive a massively different world from what they had built. Perhaps as our ancestors did before us and as Indigenous researchers now, we wonder about the endgame of a cycle of human and natural relationships entangled with extraction, and we may ask—are there other ways to be? Building from current environmental research in the Americas and Quechua principles of human engagement with the natural world—aliveness, interconnection, mystery, transformation, and power—this talk reflects on political, axiological, and methodological dimensions of Indigenous autochthony, partnered ecological research, community-directed slow technology, and learning applications that together comprise a multispecies onto-epistemological recovery project in a global context of rapid and violent development. The talk offers empirical and philosophical provocations for consideration under the current call for an Indigenous research agenda that is responsive to community interest and need with available technologies.
SPEAKER BIO
Dr. Elizabeth Sumida Huaman is Wanka/Quechua from Peru with strong genealogical family and direct community ties across the Tawantinsuyo (four quarters of Inka lands), and specifically the regions of Junín, Huancavelica, and Cusco. She is Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and studies the relationship between Indigenous lands, cultural practices, and in and out-of-school learning with Indigenous communities and Tribal institutions in the Americas.
Jointly hosted by the Human - AI Relationships Working Group at Rotman Institute for Philosophy (Western), the TEST Lab (Western), Professorship in Climate Complexity and Coloniality (UBC), and the HER Lab (UBC).
