LAUSR

In contemporary educational research, practice and policy, ‘indigenous women’ have emerged as an important focus in the global education arena. This Special Issue investigates what is significant about indigenous women and their learning in terms of policy prescriptions, research agendas and not least indigenous women’s own aspirations. The articles draw on the authors’ ongoing research and experiences from diverse countries including Ethiopia, India, Mexico, Nepal and Peru. The articles engage with indigenous women’s learning from the perspectives of rights, agency, power, gender equality and cultural, linguistic and ontological diversity. These are issues pertinent not only in these country contexts but reverberate across the field of adult education and women’s learning in the UK and beyond. This Introduction examines contemporary education policy to understand why there is a focus on indigenous women, and what such a focus contributes to promoting adult learning. It starts by questioning the global discourse of indigenous women as vulnerable and asks who are indigenous women? The articles demonstrate the kinds of marginalisations and discriminations indigenous women confront as indigenous persons, as women and as indigenous women, but they also point to women’s agency and power in the face of complex and dynamic changing social, physical, economic and cultural environments. The grounded ethnographic nature of the research also emphasises the importance of recognising indigenous women, not as a homogeneous undifferentiated group or category. It illustrates their diverse positionalities emerging from their varying historical and contemporary experiences of inequalities, opportunities and formal education, as well as their learning desires, demands and practices.