Rethinking Environmental Education through Indigenous Creative Practices
Thursday 19 November 2026, 12 midday - 1.30pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All welcome
Drawing on years of sustained collaboration with Indigenous artists, filmmakers and educators, primarily from Brazil, this talk sheds light on how creative practices can help reshape environmental education by recognising ecological responsibility and a commitment to epistemic plurality as inherently interconnected.
Taking her work on Ailton Krenak as a point of departure, she examines how linear narratives of progress turn the present into an extractable resource while deferring responsibility to an endlessly receding future. Against this politics of postponement, ancestral futurity thickens the present through continuities among memory, territory, more-than-human life and generations yet to come. In the cases discussed here, Indigenous creative practices challenge the conventional temporal frameworks of environmental education itself, shifting attention from the management of a future crisis towards an emphasis on ancestral presence and intergenerational care.
Jamille Pinheiro Dias is the Director of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Co-Director of the Environmental Humanities Research Hub at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she is also a Senior Lecturer. She recently led a British Academy ODA Global Innovation Fellowship on environmental and Indigenous film in Brazil (2025-2026). Her work focuses on Indigenous arts, environmental humanities and translation in Latin America.
