Young, Jason CIribe Ramirez, Yvette2025-10-022025-10-022025IribeRamirez_washington_0250E_28740.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/1773/54042Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025This dissertation investigates how collaborative information-science projects between Indigenous communities, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can support decolonial development and Indigenous self-determination. Centered in the Vaupés region of Colombia, the study examines the conditions under which participatory methodologies foster not only co-design, but accountability to people, to place, and to the long histories and futures embedded in Indigenous territorial governance. The research centers on a participatory training program known as the Diplomado en Liderazgo, Comunicación y Cambio Climático, co-developed with Indigenous associations ASATIQ and ASATRIZY, in partnership with Fundación Colombia Multicolor, Wildlife Works, and the Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia (UNAD). Conducted between 2021 and 2022, the diplomado brought together over a hundred leaders from communities across the Querarí, Yapú, and Papurí river regions. Through three intensive sessions, participants engaged in collaborative project development using participatory mapping, community photography (Photostories), serious games (Mayuk and Cachiveras), and thematic dialogues. These tools facilitated cultural documentation, environmental planning, and the expression of community-defined priorities for development.This work is anchored in a three-part analytical framework: settler colonial studies, Participatory Action Research (PAR), and the human rights-based approach (HRBA) to development. Settler colonialism is understood as an enduring structure that shapes the conditions of research and development in Latin America, often through exclusionary and technocratic forms of intervention. PAR, rooted in Latin American praxis and the work of Orlando Fals Borda, grounds the research in relational, iterative collaboration. The HRBA, following Charters & Stavenhagen and informed by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), articulates actionable principles for ethical development: that it must be endogenous, participatory, equitable, self-managed, culturally appropriate, and accountable. Findings from Vaupés demonstrate that participatory information systems can enable collective planning, support cultural continuity, and strengthen Indigenous governance, when they are embedded within relational processes and aligned with community-led visions. Participatory mapping helped articulate past, present, and future relationships to territory. Photostories documented daily life and ecological change while serving as platforms for reflection and advocacy. Games like Mayuk and Cachiveras opened accessible, culturally grounded dialogues about communication, identity, and environmental care. These activities surfaced priorities such as food sovereignty, intergenerational knowledge transmission, forest protection, and educational access. The diplomado's structure, which was rooted in co-facilitation, multilingual practice, and collective certification, allowed for sustained engagement and the institutional recognition of Indigenous leadership. Beyond the outputs of each individual method or their contributions to capacity building and community development, this work goes one step further by developing an evaluative HRBA framework. This tool can be applied to each method of engagement, and to the architecture of collaboration itself. That is, all of the parts that go into the development of the project: dialogue, planning, relationships building, logistics, etc. The goal here is to identify how a participatory activity/method, and all of the parts of the project, align with an HRBA principle, and which Declaration article underpins. This evaluative framework in combination with PAR can help us understand these collaborative dynamics across sectors and between communities by aligning Information Science research with a grounded approach to incorporating human rights within research design. This dual-lens approach helps bridge the gaps between arbitrary measures and metrics of success and what actionable, tangible benefits communities experience during these research and development interventions. It also creates a layer of accountability and reflection for the researchers and institutions that seek to partner with communities. This dissertation does not offer a technical model for replication, rather it offers a charge for researchers. It challenges information science research to confront the social and political consequences of its designs, to move beyond extractive research norms, and to reimagine innovation as a process rooted in humility, relationality, and principled resistance. It affirms that rights-based, participatory approaches are not simply ethical add-ons, but necessary responses to ongoing colonial structures and institutional inequities. In an era of increasing political pressure on academic freedom, evolving metrics of progress, the erosion of human rights protections, and widening digital divides, the work asserts that research must not retreat into neutrality, rather it must resist and transform. This model of engaged scholarship developed here is unfinished by design and it insists that meaningful collaboration must be relational, iterative, and guided by those whose lives, lands, and knowledges have too often been marginalized.application/pdfen-USnoneInformation scienceInformation scienceThesis