Improving our understanding of human-environment relations, and particularly of human motivations, rationale and management regimes, is paramount to the success of any biodiversity conservation initiative involving local communities. By comparing approaches, challenges and successes across case study sites, this research aims to identify those contextual settings, socio-cultural traits, incentives, and practical tools that best foster optimum long-term integration of biodiversity conservation and local wellbeing.

Indigenous people who are historical creators of knowledge about food, are among the most impoverished, food insecure people of the contemporary world. This is often due to regulations over the usage of natural resources and very rapid changes in social settings, climatic patterns and cultural practices. This has significantly transformed the diets of indigenous people’s worldwide, non-exemption of the Khwe San indigenous people of Namibia. Today, not only are less food available to the Khwe, but also in reduced nutritional quality. The widely available processed foods and Food Aid deliveries have created dependencies and undermined traditional food systems and health.

The HEI-ICI project (between Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and University of Helsinki) aims at developing a national systematic and validated quality model for teacher's in-service training in Higher Education Institutions in Peru. The second aim of the project is to enhance the network of universities in Peru (RPU) in educational development and in providing in-service training for teachers and pedagogical teaching companions (acompañantes pedagógicos) to finally empower educators of all levels with a special attention to the children among indigenous people.

The main aims of the project are the following: a) to create a new research collectivity on indigenous peoples that would be organized from the Faculty of Humanities, Helsinki University. b) to understand better current grass root challenges of indigenous peoples c) to identify new contacts at the Helsinki University and internationally d) to create new study modules. e) to integrate creativity and epistemology of indigenous people in the methods and contents of the research and teaching activities.

The project examines indigenous and Afro-American peoples’ ways to create new cognitive models for producing power. People from these backgrounds have been active in designing new education systems, engaging in politics, and creating new religious intersubjectivity in Latin America. We stress a ‘not-yet’ consciousness, modes of attention to the fact that something has still to happen or become. The proposed project focuses on agency constructions in different social, cultural, religious, and political contexts and the ideas of imagined (home)places and spaces based on indigenousness, ethnicity, and religion as they may affect people’s future transformation. We examine agencies including both human and non-human subjects. The global influences, technology, new contacts, new knowledge, and state policies are important factors in creative processes the actors can use for their agency construction.

In Latin America indigenous peoples have turned into significant political actors. This project examines how the new forms of indigenous leaderships connect to the questions of power, and consider how they are interpreted from a native point of view. The studied groups are two Arawak-speaking groups living in Western Amazonia, Brazil. In looking at the way these two groups view their spokespeople and create new political, cultural, and economic partnerships, the aim is to explore the Amerindian way of producing different bodies, authority, and agency. The research also addresses historical changes of leadership as part of other social and political processes in the past and present. The main research questions are the following: 1) What are the new forms of leadership in Amazonian native communities? 2) How can acting in new interethnic networks be understood as a new type of human-to-human relation in Amazonian sociocosmology? 3) How have social roles hold by the young indigenous people changed their communities? 4) What are the differences between young female and male native leaders? 5) How have Amazonian leaderships changed taking into account environmental changes, economic, political, social, and legal processes?

Through a case study – the Yine of Peruvian Amazonia – the research aims both at generating understanding of the relationship between materiality and immateriality in contemporary indigenous Amazonian Christianities, and at providing tools for future comparative study of these Christianities.