Renuka de Silva

Biography

Renuka de Silva, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the College of Education & Human Development at the University of North Dakota. A field-based education scholar and qualitative research methodologist, her scholarship engages the epistemological, ontological, and phenomenological dimensions of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and relating. Her research centers Indigenous storytelling across cultural and geographic contexts, including Hawai‘i, the Pacific Islands, the Dakotas, and Sri Lanka, with particular attention to how narratives carry ancestral knowledge, sustain cultural continuity, and shape individual and collective identities.

As a field-based educator, Dr. de Silva advances Indigenous pedagogies and methodologies through relational, experiential, and land-based approaches to teaching and learning. Her work brings Indigenous gardening and food systems into conversation with the arts and sciences, positioning land and cultural practices as integral to curriculum, knowledge-making, and experiential learning. She initiated the development of an Indigenous healing garden at a tribal school in North Dakota as a living educational space through which students can strengthen relationships with land, culture, community, and ancestral knowledge. This work foregrounds Indigenous agricultural knowledge and its relationships to cultural continuity, health, and well-being.

As a qualitative methodologist, Dr. de Silva advocates for scholarship that recognizes embodied experience as [k]new knowledge—knowledge that is inherited and remembered, yet continually lived, interpreted, and reconstituted through experience. Her scholarship examines how such ways of knowing shape identity, meaning-making, and relationships to place and community, while challenging externally imposed constructions of identity that confine the self within predetermined social, cultural, and corporeal boundaries.