“World” – travelling with professional indigenous women of Mexico: Collective weavings

This thesis emerges from personal and collective journeys through several contexts, lives, and times. It represents a living process that started before the academic exercise and will continue beyond it. It is a point of encounters, of arrivals and departures, of changes and permanences, of synergies, coalitions, and disagreements among the many participants who helped me to craft my arguments. It is formed by a series of plural narratives based on my listening, learning, and discussing with a group of Indigenous women from Mexico about how graduate education has informed their professional trajectories and how they are positioning themselves as political actors. My approach of allowing the thesis to emerge over time and through a plurality of voices is ethically and politically important because it recognises diverse experiences in knowledge cultivation. In this way the thesis challenges the historical marginalisation and erasures that Indigenous women face in academia and other political spaces. The thesis aims to promote inclusivity, social justice, and gender equality by providing examples of how Indigenous women’s experiences are relevant to build plural, intercultural understandings and practices, particularly in and for development studies.