A panel conversation: Indigenous cosmographies as agents of change

Margara Millán

Margara is author of articles about the Mayan Zapatista communities in Chib'tic, Chiapas, Tojolabal region. Especially in relation to the meaning of Zapatismo among the women of the communities. She is part of support groups for different Indigenous communities in  Morelos and Chiapas states, central and southern Mexico. She is part of the network of decolonial feminisms in Mexico. And author of Disordering gender, decentering the nation: the Zapatismo of indigenous women and its consequences. She has directed research projects on Alternative Modernities and New Common Sense, as well as Prefigurations of the Political. She has also published on criticism of capitalist modernity and on women's movements in Mexico.

Renzo Taddei

Renzo teaches Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies at the Federal University of Sao Paulo. He leads a research cluster at the National Science and Technology Institute for Climate Change in Brazil and has served as a member of the standing committee on climate services at the World Meteorological Organization between 2020 and 2024. Dr. Taddei has been a visiting professor at Yale University, Duke University, and the University of the Republic in Uruguay. As an anthropologist, he has done fieldwork in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and the U.S. on the interface between scientific and traditional and Indigenous environmental knowledge. His work has appeared in journals such as Nature Climate Change, American Anthropologist, Weather Climate and Society, Climatic Change, Climate Services, Environmental Science and Policy. 

Josefa Sánchez Contreras

Josefa belongs to the Zoque Indigenous people of Chimalapas, Oaxaca, Mexico and is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Granada, Spain. In the summers of 2023 and 2024 Josefa was visiting scholar at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She is co-author of Energy colonialism. Territories of sacrifice for the energy transition in Spain, Mexico, Norway and Western Sahara and is currently researching two sociological categories: racist dispossession and energy colonialism, two phenomena that account for the impact of renewable energy megaprojects on Indigenous territories in the context of climate emergency and energy crisis. From a historical perspectice Josefa is also researching the political relationship between Indigenous communities and rivers, the shaping of long-lasting territorialities and anti-colonial rebellions in the 17th and 18th centuries as expressions of territorial defences. Josefa participated in the 2023 ‘Indigenous Ecologies’ symposium hosted by UCL’s IAS.

Professor Anthony Costello

Founder and PI at Lancet Countdown

Former director of the UCL Institute for Global Health and Sustainable Development,  He is founder and PI of the Lancet Countdown and has led on the two Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Action (2009 and 2015) is if PI of the Climate Countdown Reports tracking indicators on climate change and health activism.  Prof Costello was director of the UCL Institute for Global Health from its foundation until 2015 and Director or Maternal, Adolescent and Child Health at the WHO from 2015-2018. He led to completion  twelve large population trials exploring the impact of community mobilisation through participatory women’s and community groups, was part of the UK's independent SAGE- COVID Scientific Advisory Group of Experts. Professor Costello  a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal Colleges of Physicians, Paediatrics and Child Health, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and the Faculty of Public Health.  He  received the James Spence medal from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and a BMJ Lifetime Achievement Award.

Humberto Fernández

Director of CHAC (Conservación Humana AC) at Non Governmental Organisation

CHAC (Conservación Humana AC) is a Non Governmental Organisation which has protected and lobbied for the right of Indigenous Wixárika people and territories for two decades. Humberto recently led the research, writing and submission of an application for World Heritage Status for the Wixárika Biocultural corridor. He has worked in close partnership with Indigenous Wixárika Communities in Northwestern Mexico for more than three decades and hosts a video, audio and documentary resource centre on Wixárika history and culture.

Totupica Candelario Robles

Totupica Candelario Robles is Indigenous Wixárika, from  the community Tuapurite, Jalisco State,  Mexico. A veterinary doctor from the UNAM Totupica has documented the biodiversity of the Wixárika Biocultural corridor and has accompanied his group of  'jicareros'  religious representatives/sacred gourd bearers on numerous pilgrimages along the Biocultural corridor to Wixirkuta.