Introductory Thoughts

Creative methods are essential to research that is rigorous and meaningful. When the arts and humanities meet the sciences, they do not merely make findings more accessible; they reframe the questions: What counts as data? Whose knowledge is legitimate? What kinds of futures do we allow ourselves to imagine? This is especially true in the Arctic, where local and Indigenous knowledges offer ways of attending to the land, water and people that unsettle familiar scientific categories and narratives.

Throughout the week, you will move between workshops, object-handling activities, field excursions and co-creative writing sessions designed by researchers from UiT’s Centre for Arctic Humanities, who work at the intersection of art and science.

What We Will Do and Explore

• You will practise co-creativity, storytelling and Socratic questioning as research methods in their own right.
• You will be asked to think deeply about what it takes to turn knowledge into action: how a finding, an insight or an encounter becomes something with social impact beyond the room in which it was created.
• You are invited to bring your own disciplinary tools into creative spaces and to consider what they can do in an interdisciplinary context.

This programme would not exist without the researchers who co-designed it, or without the applicants who chose curiosity over credentials in their letters.

We look forward to learning, creating, thinking differently and experiencing the Arctic together across the arts and sciences, for the sake of a planetary health that we cannot yet fully imagine.

Lilli Mittner

Academic Coordinator, UiT’s Centre for Arctic Humanities