Ekologos Lectures

The Ekologos Lectures and Workshops series creates open spaces for students, faculty, artists, and researchers to share their work with both academic and public audiences. These events are hosted across our institutional network — in Tromsø (UiT), Bangalore (RVU), Kohima (The Highland Institute), and Campinas (UNICAMP) — and aim to foster dialogue on environmental change, Indigenous knowledge, film, ecology, and the future of education.

🔹 Tromsø, Norway (UiT The Arctic University)

The Imminence of Crossing Tipping Points in the Amazon Rainforest: The Decisive Decade
🗓 6 September 2023
👤 Prof. Luiz Marques (UNICAMP)
A powerful lecture exploring the irreversible ecological threats facing the Amazon, hosted with the Center for Peace Studies.

Resilient Ecologies: Brazilian Students at the Crossroads of Indigenous Perspectives and Climate Histories
🗓 13 September 2023
👤 Veronica Monachini, Miguel da Cruz, Nicollas Pinheiro, Luiz Medina Guarani
Short presentations by exchange students from UNICAMP exploring Indigenous ethnology, climate adaptation, traditional food systems, and comparative aquaculture.

What are the Plantation Futures of Northeast Brazil
🗓 14 November 2023
👤 Nicollas Pinheiro
An Anthropology Seminar discussing the idea of the 'plantationocene' in Northeast Brazil.

(In)hospitable Landscapes: Weeds and People in the Midst of Urban Infrastructure
🗓 24 November 2023
👤 Miguel da Cruz
An Anthropology Seminar discussing human-plant relations in marginal urban zones of Campinas.

🔹 Kohima, India (The Highland Institute)

🔹 Kohima, India (The Highland Institute)
11th Annual Highland Gathering and Winter School
🗓 13–20 December 2023
👥 Multiple contributors

A week-long international gathering of scholars, students, and artists, the Winter School offered collaborative sessions on ethnography, ecologies, film, and Indigenous knowledge systems. Highlights included keynote lectures, ethnographic film labs, interspecies storytelling workshops, and excursions to surrounding villages. Below are selected sessions:

Ethnographies of Gender, Labour, and Equality in India’s Borderlands
🗓 14 December 2023
👤 Dr. Sahana Ghosh
A keynote lecture examining how gendered labour and state violence shape everyday life in India’s frontier zones.

Practice Discipline: The Vision and Pedagogy of Environmental Humanities in a Glocal Context
🗓 15 December 2023
👤 Dr. Meera Baindur
An invitation to rethink the environmental humanities through Indian philosophical traditions and contemporary ecological crises.

Cumulative Impact and Multiple Stressors to High North Ecosystems
🗓 18 December 2023
👤 Prof. Thomas Bøhn
A lecture-performance exploring ecological disruption in the Arctic through narratives, data, and parallels from the Northeast Indian highlands.

Unearthing Connections: Archaeological Collaboration and Exchange
🗓 18 December 2023
👤 Prof. Tiatoshi Jamir
A keynote exploring the ethical and epistemological stakes of collaborative archaeology in Indigenous contexts.

Risks to Indigenous Heritage Related to Watercourses in the Amazon
🗓 19 December 2023
👤 Prof. Antonio Guerreiro
Annual Highlander Lecture on Kalapalo water governance and the threat of ecological collapse in Amazonian river systems.

Tasting Tomorrow: Climate-Adapted Cultural Heritage Cuisine
🗓 15 December 2023
👤 Prof. Jonathon Keats, Tümüzo Katiry, Saktum Wonti, and Akumtong Imchen
A multisensory culinary workshop exploring climate resilience and cultural preservation through local ingredients, storytelling, and experimental cooking. Participants co-created dishes rooted in Indigenous knowledge and adaptive food practices.

Intersubjective Ecologies Lab I: Decolonising Our Relationship with Nature
🗓 14 December 2023
👤 Anna Ziya Geerling
An immersive dialogue-based workshop examining more-than-human kinship, relational ecologies, and decolonial environmental imaginaries.

Intersubjective Ecologies Lab II: Speculative Futures Workshop
🗓 15 December 2023
👤 Evan Tims
A collaborative creative session using speculative fiction and sensory ethnography to imagine food futures and post-carbon communities.

Intersubjective Ecologies Lab III: The More-than-Humane Bestiary
🗓 15 December 2023
👤 Jonathon Keats, Anna Ziya Geerling, Athul Sarala Nanu
A playful pedagogical experiment in improvisation theatre and book-making, inviting participants to co-create fictional bestiaries that reflect ecological entanglements and multispecies ways of knowing.

Story Booth: Sharing Food Stories
🗓 15 December 2023
👥 All participants, facilitated by Anna Ziya Geerling and Athul Sarala Nanu
Participants engaged in autoethnographic reflection through audiovisual storytelling, capturing recipes, myths, plants, and spirit narratives from their own cultural landscapes.

Ekologos Wiki Training Series I–IV: Digital Archives and Ethical Futures
🗓 14–19 December 2023
👤 Shyamal Lakshminaranayan, Aswathy V.
A four-part workshop series introducing participants to the Ekologos Wiki infrastructure. Sessions addressed digital preservation, participatory archiving, and the ethics of curating Indigenous Environmental Knowledge (IEK) in India’s legal context

Urban and Rural Ethnographies I: What is “Work” in Fieldwork?
🗓 14 December 2023
👤 Dr. Sahana Ghosh (National University of Singapore)
A foundational session on ethnographic sensibilities, exploring the epistemological and emotional labour of fieldwork, the texture of observational notes, and the ethical contours of participant engagement.

Urban and Rural Ethnographies II: Life and Family Histories
🗓 14 December 2023
👤 Dr. Sahana Ghosh
An intimate workshop on oral history and interviewing, introducing narrative co-construction and memory-work as vital components of ethnographic inquiry in familial and community settings.

Urban and Rural Ethnographies III: Working with Objects and Materiality
🗓 15 December 2023
👤 Dr. Sahana Ghosh
A hands-on session exploring the entanglements between material culture and social meaning. Participants experimented with objects as mnemonic devices, relational markers, and portals into fieldsite imaginaries.

Urban and Rural Ethnographies IV: Participatory Interviews and Observation
🗓 18 December 2023
👤 Dr. Michael T. Heneise (UiT/The Highland Institute)
A practice-based session encouraging students to develop site-specific questions following field excursions. Focus was placed on embodied listening, intersubjective ethics, and the atmospherics of place.

Urban and Rural Ethnographies V: Collaborative Mapping
🗓 18 December 2023
👤 Dr. Michael T. Heneise
Participants worked in small teams to visually and spatially represent relationships among people, places, memories, and environmental phenomena. The session emphasized reflexivity and spatial storytelling in ethnographic practice.

Ethnographic Film Techniques I: Introduction to Documentary Making Today
🗓 14 December 2023
👤 Prof. Piyush Roy
This seminar offered a comparative review of documentary genres, from minimalist slow cinema to expressive ethnofiction. Case studies highlighted visual storytelling, audience engagement, and the ethical use of the lens.

Ethnographic Film Techniques II: Knowledge Transfer Through Film
🗓 14 December 2023
👤 Prof. Thomas Bøhn (Institute of Marine Research, Norway)
An experimental session on translating field knowledge into audiovisual formats, focusing on ecological storytelling, aesthetic mediation, and the politics of representation.

Ethnographic Film Techniques III: Basics of Non-Fiction Filmmaking
🗓 15 December 2023
👤 Prof. Piyush Roy
Students formed small crews to shoot raw 3–5 minute ethnographic films. Emphasis was placed on framing, consent, sequencing, and narrative coherence in environmental and cultural storytelling.

Ethnographic Film Techniques IV: Audiovisual Strategies in Ekologos
🗓 15 December 2023
👤 Prof. Thomas Bøhn
This workshop explored cross-cultural visual vocabularies emerging from Ekologos projects in Brazil, India, and Norway. Discussions centred on audience reception, translation of scientific content, and community collaboration.

🔹 Bangalore, India (RV University)

Stories of the Earth: Exploring Environmental Narratives in Media and Literature
🗓 12 December 2024
👤 Mrinal Chatterjee
Opening keynote of the Ekologos II Conference, addressing environmental satire, media literacy, and literary storytelling.

Workshop on Embodied Practices
🗓 12 December 2024
👤 Shilpika Bordoloi
A workshop involving attunement and reflection through dance and movement

Ekologos Wiki
🗓 12 December 2024
👤 Shyamal Lakshminarayanan
A workshop on updates and review of the Ekologos Wiki project

Keynote Lecture: Sustainability in Graduate Education: Empowering Future Leaders for Global Impact
🗓 13 December 2024
👤 Jubin Mishra
A lecture on the state of education and leadership in the midst of climate crisis

Keynote Screening: Monarch of the Blue Mountain
🗓 13 December 2024
👤 Piyush Roy
Presentation by filmmaker, author, and dean, School of Film, Media, and Creative Arts in conversation with Assistant Professor, Filmmaking, SoFMCA, Sandipp.

Making Climate Futures
🗓 13 December 2024
👤 Evan Tims
A workshop by Fulbright scholar and founder-director, 100 Years Project

Historical Ethnographic Films by Ursula Graham Bower
🗓 13 December 2024
👤 Catriona Child
A workshop on UGB films curated by executive director, The Highland Institute, in discussion with Shilpika Bordoloi

Writing Climate Fiction and Smartphone Ethnography
🗓 13 December 2024
👤 Piyush Roy and Rahul Dev
An interactive session on emerging narrative forms and their potential for environmental storytelling.

Keynote Lecture: Ekologos: Towards a Global Environmental Humanities
🗓 16 December 2024
👤 Dr Michael T. Heneise
A presentation on the vision and scope of the Ekologos project

Ethics and Practice of Ethnographic Research at The Highland Institute
🗓 16 December 2024
👤 Tumuzo Katiry, Lue Htar, Sholu Movi
Contributions from the Earthkeepers and MyClimate projects addressing methodological ethics in fieldwork.

Ekologos Norway Exchange Students Speak
🗓 17 December 2024
👤 Ronja Gerard, Cornelia Dahle, Emanuele Bergquist
A reflective panel discussion on cross-cultural learning, hosted with RVU's School of Film, Media and Creative Arts.

Ethics of Ethnographic Research
🗓 16 December 2024
👤 Tümüzo Katiry
A presentation on the methodologies of the Earthkeepers team in Nagaland

Climate Change Perspectives and the Erosion of Traditional Practices: An Ethnographic Study of the Naga Community in Chizami Village
🗓 16 December 2024
👤 Earthkeepers Team, The Highland Institute
A presentation on ongoing ethnographic research by the MyCClimate project in Nagaland

Indigenous Climatology
🗓 16 December 2024
👤 Sholu Movi
A workshop on traditional ways of gauging weather patterns in Nagaland, in conjunction with the MyCClimate project

Keynote Lecture: The Fellowship of Tranquillity: The Poet and His Child Philosopher
🗓 12 December 2024
👤 Dr Saptarshi Mallick, Assistant Professor, University of Graz

Applications of Digital Technologies in Anthropology
🗓 17 December 2024
👤 Evaristo Ovide (UiT)
A research talk on digital tools and visual ethnography in environmental fieldwork contexts.

🔹 Campinas, Brazil (UNICAMP)

Seminário Ekologos: Reflections on Fieldwork in Norway
🗓 9 May 2024
👤 Veronica Monachini, Miguel da Cruz, Nicollas Pinheiro, Luiz Medina Guarani
A seminar hosted at UNICAMP reporting on their exchange experience in Tromsø, with reflections on Sami cosmologies, Indigenous cinema, aquaculture, and land-based learning.

Special guest: Mira Rauhala , Indigenous Sámi researcher and linguist, Finland, shared insights from her master's research on language preservation and cultural expression between Finland and Sápmi.

📺 Access & Archives

Recordings, excerpts, and student reflections from many of these events are archived through our Ekologos Wiki project. Selected lectures are also being developed into podcast episodes or featured in our open-access Highlander Journal.