Early-career researchers are often drawn to bold, interdisciplinary questions but discouraged from pursuing them. Rather than waiting for some imprecise future time perceived as “better” than the present, CIFAR is committed to ensuring junior scholars have opportunities to pursue highly interdisciplinary topics from the outset. Pushing back against the mainstream, we foster a culture that celebrates this kind of daring exploration and intellectual risk-taking. Our Next Generation Initiatives seek to dismantle barriers to successful research careers and build lasting peer networks. By fostering new international networks of like-minded junior scholars, we are harnessing their energy and unencumbered thinking to pursue and make headway in groundbreaking areas of inquiry.

Under CIFAR’s Next Generation strategy, Radical Interdisciplinarity (RI) is a convening style designed to engage exceptional junior faculty and postdoctoral scholars from across selected jurisdictions to identify frontier topics in research and provide opportunities for them to take risks in working across the academy. Symposia topics and individual sessions are designed to provoke discussion and to bring out-of-the-box ideas to the table, thus building bridges across disciplines. Through the integration of foresight-driven methods and frames, participants will think beyond the horizon to inspire new collaborations and research opportunities.

Radical Interdisciplinarity: Indigenous Knowledges (March 30-31, 2026) will be CIFAR’s third RI forum.

Held in Banff, Alberta, the forum will focus on Indigenous Knowledges, welcoming early-career Indigenous scholars from around the world to leverage their unique perspectives and ways of knowing to establish research trajectories that benefit Indigenous communities globally and respect Indigenous sovereignty. Integrating diverse knowledge systems is essential for tackling global problems that transcend borders, disciplines, complex systems, and ways of knowing. In creating a network of global Indigenous scholars, this meeting approaches knowledge from a diversity of perspectives, with a broad focus on relationality.

RI: Indigenous Knowledges has been developed and informed by 3 Honorary Co-Chairs, 3 Program Partners and a Steering Committee composed of 11 early-career Indigenous scholars from 6 countries. With their leadership, we have confirmed 40 participants representing 6 continents, 18 countries, 26 Indigenous Peoples, disciplines across the natural, physical, and social sciences, and career stages from PhD candidate to junior faculty.

RI Indigenous Knowledges will be centred around Indigenous Logics and Relational Knowledge Systems and includes 3 themes:

Theme 1: Storytelling, Time, and Continuity Across Knowledge Systems
- Exploring how memory, narrative, and temporal understandings sustain continuity between generations and across disciplines, cultures, and time.

Theme 2: Climate Justice, Planetary Health, and Environmental Research Ethics
- Mobilizing Indigenous ecological and ethical knowledges to guide equitable and sustainable futures.

Theme 3: Indigenous Knowledge, AI, and Data Sovereignty
- Reclaiming technological futures through Indigenous governance, creativity, and collaboration.

RI Seed Grants for Participants

Following RI: Indigenous Knowledges, CIFAR will invite participants to apply for an RI Seed Grant. Applications will require two or more co-applicants based in different countries, ideally with representation from multiple disciplines. Priority will be given to projects that will strengthen ties between new collaborators and have the potential to build into larger-scale projects. Grants will be awarded to teams to do one of the following:

1. Further develop a grant proposal for extramural funding
2. Hold a planning workshop for future symposia or conferences
3. Further new research collaborations
4. Produce co-authored papers
5. Create podcasts, websites, or other online media resources

We invite the Templeton World Charity Foundation to consider a one-time grant to support RI Seed Grants for Participants. With your support, CIFAR will award 5 to 10 Seed Grants of no more than $10,000.

Significantly, RI: Indigenous Knowledges will lay the groundwork for future activities in support of a transnational Indigenous research community, with participants helping to shape and build the foundation for new programming at CIFAR. In extending seed funding to participants, CIFAR hopes to catalyze new and career-spanning intellectual connections amongst participants who otherwise would not have been able to develop long-lasting international connections. Seed Grants for the RI: Indigenous Knowledges participants will support early-career researchers, sharpen ideas emanating from blue-sky brainstorming, interdisciplinary exchange, and put forward ideas for future - and continued - engagement with the next generation of Indigenous scholars.