Multilingualism, Sustainability and Education in Amazonia (MSEA): Understanding the complex relationship between social actors, their languages, and the natural world.

MSEA is a timely, ambitious interdisciplinary, participatory OSC aimed at understanding the endogenous principles of living well in nature – i.e., endogenous sustainability – in Amazonia through the lens of language. Specifically, we seek to understand how socio-culturally diverse, multilingual indigenous groups deal with contemporary environmental issues (e.g. food supply systems, deforestation and ecotourism) through the analysis of interactionally achieved language practices and related socioecological data. This understanding will lay the groundwork for tackling other societal challenges in Amazonia such as the integration of indigenous multilingual voices within the epistemic dialogue on environmental protection through education and research for sustainability

The project focuses on the Amazonian Trapezium (borders between Colombia, Brazil, and Peru), which represents 6.8% of the whole Amazon biome. Home to complex ecosystems and heterogeneous indigenous and transnational groups, this territory is extremely vulnerable due to the large influx of tourists and its high environmental and sociolinguistic fragility. Numerous initiatives for preservation of natural and cultural diversity have been undertaken there. However, the complexity of linguistic groups and ecosystems has been so far addressed separately. And, when indigenous groups are included in sustainable projects, their multilingual repertoires are not considered in the research processes and in the production of knowledge. This results in a gap in the understanding of the dynamic relationship between social actors, their languages, and the natural world. MSEA fills this gap proposing a ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach mobilising methods and theories from socio-cultural linguistics, environmental linguistics, and sustainability sciences.