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Despite the existing gaps in the use of technology in East Africa, the region is among the fastest-growing mobile data users on the continent. This progress is partially attributed to local initiatives to develop and adapt homegrown technologies to local contexts to increase their accessibility and use even in the remotest areas. In this chapter we identify a few of these innovations in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda and examine how they have been indigenised to fit local contexts as well as the processes of their diffusion, adoption, affordability and accessibility among users and their everyday gratifications from the innovations. The socio-technological assemblage theory, which illuminates the influences of, and the connections between various types of actors and their roles, visions, ideas, concepts and the technological products, informs our inquiry. Other related concepts including ‘innovation’, ‘indigenisation’ and ‘diffusion’ are discussed to understand the homegrown technology innovations and their adaptability. Discussions with both innovators and users/beneficiaries reveal rigorous proactiveness and responsiveness of innovation creators and users in the three countries – reflected in numerous attestations of life transformation. Nevertheless, there is a paradigm shift in the diffusion of innovations amongst users – contrary to the discourse around its early precepts.

My research is a personal effort to understand the experiences that have shaped my work, practice, and living of teaching mathematics. From the boy storied as being smart in mathematics to the man who was tasked in finding ways to Indigenize school mathematics, I have composed stories to live by that share the tensions, conflicting stories, and mis-educative experiences that have shaped who I am as a White Euro-Western mathematician in a Canadian prairie province. My research wonder serves a practical justification as I “attend to the importance of considering the possibility of shifting, or changing practice” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 36) in the context of cross-cultural teaching and learning. Much of the research around Indigenous mathematics education is shaped by misconceptions of Indigenization and inconsistent practices of how this is taken up by practitioners – topics that I analyzed during my doctoral studies. Through my inquiry described in the chapter, I hoped to achieve a nuanced understanding of how the experiences of diverse lives shape the learning of school mathematics.

In 2019, the Kaurna Nation and traditional custodians of the Adelaide plains in South Australia, challenged the City of Holdfast Bay to walk alongside them to create an exhibition exploring the true history of South Australia’s colonisation. This collaboration ultimately became the award-winning exhibition ‘Tiati Wangkanthi Kumangka’ (Truth-Telling Together). This project was envisioned, led, and implemented by the Kaurna Nation at the Bay Discovery Centre in South Australia. Ultimately, ‘Tiati’ became more than just another exhibition. It became a pathway to healing and possibility for both the Kaurna Nation and the City of Holdfast Bay. When considering indigenisation of museum spaces, ‘Tiati’ demonstrates how smaller museums and/or local government can play a pivotal role in reshaping the traditional narrative of colonialism in Australia’s museums, with the voice of First Nations people at the forefront.

This paper argues for the inclusion of Indigenous research methodologies in diversity scholarship to (1) adequately account for and value the identity, lived experiences and concerns of Indigenous Peoples and (2) to enrich diversity theorising and scholarship by proposing new ways to think about and conduct research on difference, inclusion and belonging. We further highlight the roles non-Indigenous researchers can play in supporting Indigenous methodologies.

We introduce EDI readers to Indigenous research methodologies through explicating two Indigenous (Maori) methodologies from Aotearoa New Zealand and demonstrating points of convergence and divergence from existing methodologies evident in diversity scholarship.

The application of Eurocentric methodologies, including postcolonial approaches, can inaccurately theorise Indigenous experience through a Western lens compounding the ongoing impacts of colonialism. Conversely, drawing primarily from cultural knowledge and traditions, Indigenous methodologies place considerable value on people and place, relationships and relational accountabilities, each underpinned by an explicit intent to produce research with positive transformative potential for participant communities. Using Kaupapa Maori and Mana Wahine research as examples, we highlight how elements of “resistance” aligns with critical theories, but the “difference” inherent in Indigenous methodologies enables a more authentic engagement with people and place that is critical to understanding issues of significance to Indigenous Peoples.

This paper addresses the lack of engagement with Indigenous research methodologies and priorities of Indigenous communities within diversity scholarship. We argue that Indigenous priorities make broader contributions to the diversity agenda by attributing deeper meaning to difference and resistance as enacted through the context specificity of the Indigenous world. We contend Indigenous methodologies illuminate unique perspectives and priorities that can make powerful contributions to broader discussions of equity, inclusion and belonging.

This paper delves into the enduring influence of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s groundbreaking work, “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples,” while examining how the concept of “struggle” has facilitated Māori-centric nursing education.

Utilizing a case study approach, a collaboration between Māori and non-Māori nursing academics describes the development of two Māori-centric postgraduate courses. This approach allows for an exploration of the contextual factors surrounding sites of “struggle” in course development and efforts towards decolonization and indigenization.

The evaluation of a Māori-centric postgraduate course is guided by Smith’s five key conditions for “struggle”. By illustrating the dynamic and intersecting nature of these conditions, the study reveals how various interests, tensions and relationships intersect within academia. We further show how the team actively sought viable solutions to strengthen the Maori nursing workforce and those nurses serving Maori communities through the development of tailored courses.

This case study offers a unique perspective on the tensions inherent in the struggles faced by Māori women and their allies, who utilize cultural frameworks as sites of resistance within Western institutions. We highlight how education can carve out new spaces for Māori within their cultural context and the broader academic sphere. Inspired by Smith’s work, this dialogue transcends academic boundaries, echoing the values, knowledge and experiences of Indigenous peoples marginalized by colonialism.

Embedded in built environment discourse, this chapter examines the traditional knowledge and resilience of the Ngadjuri Nation Peoples through an Elder’s narrative of reconciliation as well as resistance in their subsisting colonial settlement. Removed from ‘Country’ in the 1840s, Ngadjuri Aboriginal community endured colonial industries of open-cut copper mining and large-scale pastoralism as irreparable destruction to their cultural landscapes. European processes in the resources sectors reshaped natural topographies, deconstructing Ngadjuri Songlines and Ancestral Dreaming stories. Burra’s colonial stone buildings of settlement, painstakingly cut and composed from materials of the surrounding ecological terrain, prompted new narratives from Ngadjuri as a way of alleviating scars. Broadly speaking, this chapter aims to show how cultural heritage of two communities is provocatively and conceptually unpacked through the vernacular buildings’ cross-cultural foundations. That is, an under-reported narrative was unwittingly bestowed on the colonial-built forms with hidden meanings that deserve further investigation. This chapter offers a counternarrative to colonial histories revealing Ngadjuri’s methods for reconnecting to Country and culture after generations of disempowerment. It explores how within the materiality of colonial structures, the Ngadjuri entwined their remediated storylines – revealing a data curation that had avoided popular discourse in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] sector representation. This example implies there are bodies of knowledge in built cultural heritage hidden elsewhere on our Aboriginal Nations and the challenges it presents GLAM in their Indigenisation processes.

This chapter explores the Aboriginal artefacts ‘clapsticks’ as a form of cultural data – a means of disseminating cultural knowledge in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] sector. How might alternative methods of curation animate clapsticks as active objects that deliver effective knowledge transfer? This research aims to explore and extend current industry practices of the curation of clapsticks, within the existing parameters of technology, spatial capacity, financial support, and governance as part of the operation of the GLAM sector. The research problem, therefore, explores the past limitations of colonial framing of cultural institutions that once hindered the revealing, the disseminating, and the ‘awakening’ of the complexities of knowledge intrinsic to Aboriginal cultural artefacts. Informal communication with Aboriginal community members and academics was critical to providing cultural context as well as personal beliefs and aspirations vital to conceptualising the future of cultural representation. This investigation explores how a cultural centre offers a space and an opportunity to facilitate the clapsticks datasets in its capacity as a performance-focussed building rather than solely an exhibition space or keeping place. This potential represents a shift in thinking around the clapsticks being a lens through which the stories of Aboriginal culture can be disseminated.

The paper seeks to analyse the constellation of social structures, administrative institutions and hierarchies that sustain the exclusion of the San minority group in Zimbabwe, with a particular focus on how the European expansion in the eighteenth century, the modern state and private property owners have colluded to perpetuate exclusion from accessing forest as their natural habitat. The purpose of this paper is to therefore highlight the various abuses, including those social, administrative legislative frameworks that discriminate against the San minority and it advocates for actions the right to consultation and the right to free, prior and informed consent to proposed developments.

Through the modern ethnographic approach, data generation was guided by the principles of indigenous and decolonising research methodologies, which place emphasis on the importance of San people telling their own stories thereby shifting the power of a researcher to the indigenous participants. This is a qualitative study that gives prominence to the descriptions of experiences (phenomenology) and interpretations (hermeneutic) of their survival. The paper employed cultural ecology theoretical framework as a lens through which to see the San’s exclusion from forest resources and how this has tragically shifted their egalitarian lifestyle characterised by reciprocity, sharing and levelling to adaptation to the unfamiliar sedentary farming practices.

The technical implementation of forest boundary demarcation and forcing the San to join sedentary farming form part of the state’s territorialisation that excludes, restricts and disrupts the San minority from accessing forest products. The treatment of the minority group reveals not only the enormous authority of the state to transfer alienation to individuals and companies but also to legitimise the exclusion by establishing laws and policies that safeguard the interests of those favoured by the state. The San, who are already overly dominated by the social administrative structures of the Ndebele and Kalanga tribes, lack systematic and organised responses to their marginalisation.

The San community in Zimbabwe is under-researched and under-theorised particularly in relation to how historically formed postcolonial hierarchies of exclusion and marginalisation manifest themselves in contemporary resource governance. Less is known about how those that are powerful – government officials, private property owners and Kalanga/Ndebele tribes benefit more from the environmental resources than the powerless minority San, whose livelihoods depend on the primary natural resources. The unequal power relations have been demonstrated by the evictions of the minority from wildlife areas that were converted into game parks. The study reveals how indigenous San not only resist exclusion but also develop adaptable strategies through negotiations to improve their situation with social and administrative institutions.

This chapter came about, after five years of working with the Ngadjuri community on speculative student cultural centre designs. Ideation for those conversations and studio-based interactions, in addition to time and cultural tours spent on Country, revealed a variety of opinions and hopes that exist within the Ngadjuri community for a place to celebrate their cultural heritage. This heritage has an incredible history, and the idea of a cultural centre has been topical since the late Uncle Vince Copley Senior worked with other Ngadjuri community members such as Robert Rigney, on Country and in an advocacy role for Ngadjuri more than 30 years ago. This series of yarnings from a two-part transcription process re-awakens those desires of Elders now passed. The transcriptions are complemented with literature around yarning as a research methodology that delivers current, immediate, and insightful personal thoughts, although only as personal as the lead yarner wishes to share. In addition, the literature contextualises the key themes of which the yarnings divulge. Research has indicated how yarning interactions and interrelationships create a unique dynamic between the researcher and the community members. It is these rich experiences where knowledge is shared in a two-way exchange that is noteworthy for the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums [GLAM] sector. GLAM sector priorities must implement policy to pursue future Indigenisation of their epistemological methods and ontological systems. To address any future data curation of Ngadjuri cultural heritage materials on Country or in GLAM, hearing the personal stories and desires seemed timely and necessary.