Course for PhD students: “Collectives of knowledge creation: recasting academic practices”
The course invites students to engage with scholars, artists and knowledge holders to explore and experiment with questions over what knowledge is. We will engage with the entanglements between Indigenous and academic knowledge, and ask what tensions and possibilities that lie in this meeting.
When & Where
Date: 22.10.2025 - 25.10.2025
Where: Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat
"Collectives of knowledge creation: recasting academic practices", to be held in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat.
The course invites students to engage with scholars, artists and knowledge holders to explore and experiment with questions over what knowledge is. We will engage with the entanglements between Indigenous and academic knowledge, and ask what tensions and possibilities that lie in this meeting. How is the knowledge we need for a liveable future best created, by whom, and towards what ends?
The course will be situated in Girjegumpi, the nomadic Sámi library of architecture, which at the time of the course will be a visitor of Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat. Girjegumpi will here be part of the Suialaa Arts Festival 2025, and the course program will be an integrated part of the library’s public festival program. It is co-organised by Girjegumpi’s main creator, the Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango and the research projects Birgejupmi and UrbTrans.
Interdisciplinary beyond the bounds of academia, the course will run over four days. The first course day will find place outside the Girjegumpi program and is dedicated to the creation of a safe space of learning between participants. The following three days are part of the Girjegumpi program, each of which will be organised around the materialities and practices of food procurement and preparation; skin work; and the uses of turf in architecture. As part of the course, we will engage with ‘walking pedagogy’ as a mode of learning with and through land and sea. Through such multimodal methods, the course explores the connections between art, land, healing, and Indigenous knowledge.
Throughout the course we will engage with literatures and discussions that seek to open the question of what appropriate knowledge creation is and should be, and on how such knowledges can be put into practice. When researching the Arctic, we ask, what modes of knowledge creation and what knowledge collectives do we need to engage in?
We take as our premise that Arctic lands are the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples. Arctic Indigenous peoples hold unique ways of knowing and living with land, water and resources, and these ways of knowing must be respected and acknowledged also by researchers. Rather than separate out different forms of “scientific” knowledge we aim to bind together practices across disciplines and ways of knowing.