I propose a longitudinal ethnographic study of how newly qualified Indigenous Amazonian educators are employing emergent digital technologies, particularly AI and large language models.

My work builds on 33 months of prior ethnographic fieldwork at intercultural universities in Peruvian Amazonia, during which I traced the professional and personal trajectories of almost thirty Indigenous students who aspired to become the very first Indigenous schoolteachers in their home communities. I observed how these underprivileged students adapted to university information technologies despite coming from communities where such infrastructures were scarce or absent, and how many of them articulated a clear ambition to transfer these tools back to their Indigenous communities. This paper follows that cohort into their first years of teaching to examine how they are realising those ambitions today. The study combines follow-up ethnography (in person and online), semi-structured interviews, classroom observation, and analysis of locally produced pedagogical materials to capture practice and meaning. I focus on teachers’ interpretations of the epistemic promises and limits of conversational AI and LLMs, and how these intersect with intercultural curricula, community norms, and aspirations for epistemic justice.

The paper emphasises processes of appropriation, hybridisation, and selective refusal: how technologies are adapted to local teaching aims, languages, and cosmologies, how teachers negotiate community expectations about knowledge transmission, and how they reconfigure tools to sustain Indigenous pedagogical aims.

Overall, this research contributes ethnographic nuance to debates on educational futures and offers practical implications for teachers, designers and policymakers working across unequal global scales.

Authors:
Angela Giattino, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Angela Giattino specialises in the anthropology of higher education, epistemology, youth, ethnicity, sustainability, health, migration, and autoethnography, with a longstanding expertise on Latin America, particularly Peruvian Amazonia, alongside the Mediterranean, primarily southern Italy. Dr Giattino's current Leverhulme research project examines how pioneering “intercultural” universities incorporate Indigenous knowledge systems into environmental science training for Amazonian youth in Peru –one of the world’s top five countries for Indigenous diversity. This work documents the very first generation of environmentally educated Indigenous Amazonians, exploring higher education’s importance in pluralising knowledge and fostering sustainable development worldwide. The future of human development lies in progress that preserves our natural world.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

Bookmark