Dr Karen Tucker

My research focuses on the colonial politics of knowledge that shape encounters with Indigenous knowledges, bodies and natures, and the decolonial practices that can reveal and remake them.

I have a longstanding interest in the politics of Indigenous knowledge and biodiversity, and the global objects and frameworks of governance that are being constructed in an attempt to reduce biopiracy and misappropriation. I am currently completing a book manuscript that encapsulates more than a decade of research on these topics, focusing in particular on the colonial politics of knowledge that have been contested and reproduced through work on these issues in the World Trade Organisation and World Intellectual Property Organisation.

Building directly on this research, I am also developing new projects on the political ontology of reforestation, and the potential of indigenous knowledges to contribute to culturally- and ecologically-sensitive tree-planting for climate change mitigation, the latter in collaboration with researchers at the Universidad Austral and Mapuche Pehuenche communities in Chile.

My previous research has examined peace activism in Peru and Colombia, legacies of forced sterilisation in Peru (in the award-winning Quipu project), and the politics of global resistance.