Diana Denham

Research project

Centering Indigenous Knowledge and Values in Integrated Agroecological Renewable Energy Systems

Project summary

Toward Plural Renewable Energy Futures

The global transition away from fossil fuels is one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century. Yet the rapid deployment of renewable energy infrastructures raises important questions about competing demands on land, effects on soil and water systems, and implications for equity, justice, and Indigenous self-determination. Large-scale solar and wind projects increasingly displace or constrain agricultural production, biodiversity conservation, and other ecosystem functions, while Indigenous territories have become key targets for energy development initiatives. Compounding this potential threat to Indigenous sovereignty is the dominance of a single land-use paradigm in energy planning, with far-reaching implications for landscapes worldwide. Treating energy infrastructure as the exclusive use of extensive stretches of land puts rural land in competition with both food production and the provision of other ecosystem services.

This project addresses these challenges by investigating how renewable energy, food production, and environmental stewardship can be pursued as complementary rather than competing land uses through Integrated Agroecological Renewable Energy Systems. Bringing together insights from geography, Indigenous studies, mechanical engineering, biology, and soil sciences, it develops an alternative approach to renewable energy design that integrates expertise from these fields with the knowledge and priorities of Indigenous communities. In doing so, the project confronts longstanding legacies of exclusion in scientific knowledge production and demonstrates how bringing diverse bodies of knowledge into dialogue can reshape technological innovation and scientific inquiry to address pressing socio-environmental challenges.

Co-producing Knowledge Across Disciplines and Communities

The project combines Participatory Action Research from the social sciences with co-design approaches from engineering, positioning community members as collaborators throughout the research process—from defining research questions to interpreting findings and envisioning technological futures. This approach responds to growing calls for more democratic forms of scientific inquiry while addressing inequalities in knowledge production.

The research centers two Indigenous communities: Pawnee Nation in Oklahoma, United States, and Yaviche, a Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico. Despite their distinct ecological conditions and historical trajectories, the communities share traditions of “three sisters”-based agroecology (biodiverse cultivation centered on maize, beans, and squash), a commitment to using renewable energy in support of community priorities, and a focus on expanding the conditions for sovereignty and autonomía. Conducted in partnership with Pawnee Nation College and Instituto Kieru Kass, and supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Growing Convergence Research Program, the project engages farmers, environmental practitioners, educators, and scientists, through convergent learning workshops, field experiments, and collaborative design.

Research at Iméra

During the fellowship at Iméra, I will analyse the extensive qualitative materials generated through this project, including interviews, ethnographic field notes, workshop transcripts, community planning documents, participatory evaluations, audiovisual documentation, and records of technological co-design. The analysis will explore how collaboration across diverse knowledge systems unfolds in practice, how it shapes technological innovation, and what tensions and possibilities it reveals for more pluralistic approaches to scientific inquiry.

More broadly, the project asks what becomes possible when the energy transition is understood not only as a shift from fossil fuels to renewable technologies, but also as an opportunity to rethink relationships among science, society, and the environment. It examines how Indigenous knowledge can contribute not only to more just and regenerative energy systems but also to new ways of producing scientific knowledge that are better equipped to address intertwined socio-environmental challenges.

Biography

Diana Denham is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma. Working at the intersection of human geography and urban studies, her research examines how Indigenous and subaltern communities assert autonomy through struggles over environmental and cultural resources. Committed to interdisciplinary collaboration, she has worked with researchers in wetland ecology, plant biology, soil science, mechanical engineering, political science, and Native American Studies. The research she is undertaking at the Iméra emerges from one such partnership: a community-engaged research initiative supported by the Growing Convergence Research program of the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Her research trajectory is also defined by more than a decade of collective knowledge production with communities on the frontlines of struggles against inequality. In Mexico, she edited Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca (PM Press, published in Spanish and English). Her current book project, “The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Urban Mexico” (in revision for Duke University Press), is an ethnographic and historical study of a precolonial Mesoamerican urban institution–the open-air markets known by their Nahuatl name, tianguis. It explores how Indigenous resurgence through foodways produces urban space in ways that counter ongoing processes of dispossession while illuminating the tensions and contradictions that shape both food sovereignty and Indigenous resurgence as urban political projects.

Diana Denham holds a FIAS fellowship for 2026-2027.
The FIAS fellowship Programme is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement n°101217263.