This conference will explore these opportunities and their implications. They touch upon many contemporary issues, including some difficult political ones. The conference will challenge the stark 'local' and 'global' polarity, and question knowledge making processes that separate technology from power and politics. There is a need to investigate portrayals of 'indigenous knowledge', and the 'production of locality', as countering universalising western science. Recent anthropological concern with the cultural and historical specificity of development policy casts scientific discourse and 'global knowledge' as more contingent and 'local'.
Anthropology has a wealth of experience and much to offer the indigenous knowledge movement.
The production of identity and locality in the documentation of local knowledges. The relation between the discourse on others' knowledge and colonial governance as well as development thinking. The need to critique monoliths of 'development' and explore different traditions of development, colonial experiences and regional modernities. The above represent a few of the possibilities that we think fall within the scope of the Conference and we are open to further suggestions. At this stage we are asking for expressions of initial interest.