Gabriela Alonso-Yanez

Chile is considered an outlier compared to other Latin American countries, where Indigenous demands have had significant effects on state reforms and the broader political landscape. The constitutional process initiated in 2019 opened new avenues for Indigenous political participation. In this article, we analyze the interactions among Indigenous and non-Indigenous collectives during the constitutional process through the lens of indigenismo. Drawing on Situational Analysis, we examine how different social worlds engaged with questions of identity, representation, and political rights throughout the constitutional process. The findings show that Indigenous participation was characterized by tensions between the promises of expanded political participation and the institutional and political forces that constrained their influence. These interactions reveal struggles to represent Indigenous communities within state institutions, where they are invited but often ignored. The article contributes to broader discussions about Indigenous political participation and the evolving role of indigenismo in contemporary Latin American politics. Chile es atípico en comparación con otros países latinoamericanos, donde las demandas indígenas han tenido efectos significativos en reformas estatales y en el panorama político amplio. El proceso constitucional iniciado en 2019 abrió nuevas vías para la participación indígena. En este artículo, analizamos las interacciones entre colectivos indígenas y no indígenas durante el proceso constitucional a través del lente del indigenismo. Basados en el Análisis Situacional, examinamos cómo distintos mundos sociales se involucraron en temas de identidad, representación y derechos a lo largo del proceso. Argumentamos que la participación indígena estuvo caracterizada por tensiones entre promesas de mayor participación política y las fuerzas institucionales y políticas que limitaron su influencia. Estas interacciones revelan disputas de representación de las comunidades indígenas, las que son invitadas a instituciones estatales pero frecuentemente ignoradas. El artículo contribuye a los debates sobre participación política indígena y el papel del indigenismo en la política latinoamericana contemporánea.

Purpose: This article analyzes the gendered “invisible work” in Latin American and Caribbean climate collaborations. Using case studies from Jamaica, Panama, Colombia and Brazil, we examine the unacknowledged sociocultural and sociospatial labor of women, including mediation, network navigation and emotional management that underpins community projects and territorial defense. This work, often masked by tokenistic inclusion, is racialized and spatially embedded. We argue that effective, equitable transdisciplinary practice requires centering these contributions, moving beyond visual representation to genuinely value the relational and logistical labor that sustains socioecological collaboration in the context of climate challenges. Design/methodology/approach: This is a qualitative study involving interviews, storytelling, documents, project reports, secondary data and field visits to sites in Colombia and Panama in 2022 and 2024. For these cases, reflective conversations were held both formally and informally with community members involved in local environmental initiatives. These discussions enabled self-reflection, identifying barriers and enablers of conservation. A key element was citizen action deliberative spaces (conversatorios de acción ciudadana), which integrated diverse knowledge into decision-making, with contributions through Canva presentations, stories, photos, testimonies, poems and autobiographies that highlighted social and environmental dynamics. In-depth interviews with women involved in transdisciplinary projects lasted about an hour, following an open-ended protocol to explore their experiences, roles, challenges, recognition, and perceptions of value. Each interview ended with a prompt to identify the “elephant in the room,” encouraging reflection on unnoticed tasks, invisible labor, and emotional or logistical contributions. Findings: The findings highlight that women play a crucial role in climate and sustainability efforts, with activists, researchers and funding directors doing unseen work beyond official activities. Community leaders fighting violence organize resistance under fragile conditions, using media to protect and raise awareness. Researchers and funders build trust, provide emotional support and help marginalized groups access resources. These practices, advocacy, care, tactical engagement and networking are unpaid and unrecognized, but essential for maintaining collaborations and ensuring long-term project success. Research limitations/implications: Our feminist methodological framework insists on the critical importance of “on-the-ground” work and everyday practice. This is not merely an intellectual interest at the micro-level, but a political commitment to understanding sociality and collaboration not as abstract infrastructure, but as a concrete series of interactions in which power, difference and labor are negotiated. By making these routine exchanges the primary unit of analysis, we provide a helpful lens for making visible and, therefore, transforming the mechanisms of inequality that are reproduced or challenged in daily practice. Practical implications: Given the growth of such projects in climate and socioecological research, our study offers a critical, actionable framework. The mechanisms we identify can be used to audit and improve ongoing collaborations. Those involved in collaborative research work can apply our analytical lens to document, expose and name this invisible work, conceptualized for decades yet persistently ignored. This moves beyond academic critique to a practice of social justice and care, translating longstanding theory into a concrete commitment to recognize, validate and reward the essential work that holds collaboration together. Social implications: Our study’s contribution lies in its robust case scope and regional breadth. We present a transferable approach for revealing invisible work within transdisciplinary collaborations. By engaging data from four countries with diverse participants, including academic, funders and Indigenous women, we identify consistent mechanisms of work erasure that cut across different epistemological affiliations and project types. This broad, comparative scope enables us to argue that the invisibility of work is not an isolated issue but a systemic feature of transdisciplinary collaborations. Originality/value: This study contributes to the broader understanding of invisible work by connecting empirical evidence to actionable suggestions for funding agencies, academic institutions and policy actors. It exposes the “gendered elephant in the room,” the essential, often unacknowledged work performed predominantly by women that sustains transdisciplinary collaborations and underscores the need to move beyond symbolic recognition toward structural and procedural changes that value all forms of work, visible and invisible, in climate change research. Our intersectional framework of connecting the embodied, everyday work of women to the structural institutional logic is highly applicable. It offers a helpful tool for other fields where similar dynamics of invisible labor and epistemic exclusion hinder collaboration and reinforce inequality.

The Belmont Forum and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) organized an online training workshop on transdisciplinary (TD) approaches at the Sustainability, Research, and Innovation Congress (SRI) in 2022. The IAI is an intergovernmental organization that brings together 19 countries from the Americas to support adaptation to the world’s changing environment. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of major funders and international science councils to promote knowledge about sustainability science. The workshop aimed to create a safe environment for participants to share their impressions of and experiences about transdisciplinary research, using the Americas (IAI mandate) as a launching point for TD approaches globally. The workshop consisted of two online sessions: Transdisciplinary Approach 101 and Transdisciplinary Case Studies. The objectives of the current workshop report are: 1) to identify the key takeaways regarding common challenges and opportunities for transdisciplinary practice among workshop participants’ experiences, upon which to base recommendations for best practices, e.g., managing power imbalances, conflicting priorities and timeframes, enhancing communication and consolidating contextual awareness. 2) to offer insights to build better strategies for “train the trainers'' processes around transdisciplinarity, especially in congresses and short-term events, including using an experience-based approach, offering specific tools and increasing the participation of non-academic partners. This report encourages the implementation of other training processes by experienced transdisciplinary researchers, practitioners, and funders, in order to build capacities for collaborative approaches in diverse scientific communities.

The theoretical framework for this study draws on conceptual advances from two bodies of scholarship: 1) complexity thinking in education, which has recently focused on school system change and, 2) school leadership research, which has recently attended to the effects of leadership interventions to school improvement. Using a complexity-thinking framework, the purpose of this study was to understand how leadership practices contribute to shaping change in school systems and how change occurred across the system. Our study was conducted in an urban centre in Alberta within a public-school jurisdiction and in an area of the city that had a high population of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds from low-income households compared to other areas across the school jurisdiction. Students in this area typically scored in the lowest quartile on provincial standardized examinations. Our findings are significant because complexity thinking in the context of school leadership has not received sufficient empirical attention. In our study we identified and described pedagogical leadership practices that play a central role in redressing disparities currently found in schools.

Non-technical summary: Global sustainability challenges and their impact on society have been well-documented in recent years, such as more intense extreme weather events, environmental degradation, as well as ecosystem and biodiversity loss. These challenges require a united effort of scientists from multiple disciplines with stakeholders, including government, non-government organizations, corporate industry, and members of the general public, with the aim to generate integrated knowledge with real-world applicability. Yet, there continues to be challenges for these types of collaboration. In this commentary, we describe processes of collective unlearning that serve to decenter academia in collaborations leading to a more equitable positioning of practitioners engaged in collaborative global sustainability research.

Exploring science as a collective undertaking embedded in sociocultural contexts is a critical aspect of science education. This article concerns questions of curriculum design for science education for young learners, and it reports findings of a study on a conservation and environmental education initiative in Mexico’s Sierra de Huautla Biosphere Reserve. Using situational analysis to study this case, I discovered that conservation projects and the science behind them are seldom framed as situated within complex social factors; yet these factors often drive decisions about the environment and can drastically affect what is taught in science curriculums. Presenting science in all its complexity can make science curriculums ‘live’ and can help students understand science as instrumental in addressing challenges that society confronts today.