Sustainable Naturecultures and Multispecies Future

The research community Sustainable Naturecultures and Multispecies Future (SuMu) examines northern change and the interaction between Northern landscapes, people, other species and more-than-human environment. The research themes are closely linked to the strategic choices of the University of Lapland and the long-term efforts within multidisciplinary environmental research, through which the university has accumulated an extensive and diverse body of knowledge in science and art. There is a particular focus on questions of sustainability and responsibility in northern contexts.

The age of the Anthropocene – a new geological age when human activities have become the main driving force behind the Earth’s geological changes – further emphasizes the significance of multidisciplinary research. It challenges us to develop new theoretical and methodological perspectives, solutions, identifying and learning from the histories of our planet's multispecies communities and beings.

The research community brings together scientists from across Social Sciences disciplines, for example those interested in naturecultures, multispecies encounters, and natural resource politics in a time of planetary change (e.g. climate change, mass extinction of species). We are unified in our desire to exercise ethical agency through our research and teaching instead of merely acting as observers of change.

Our objectives are:

• to seek new perspectives to understand and to develop solutions in response to planetary changes,
• to develop new research perspectives to address changes in ecosocial coexistence,
• to bring together research conducted within social sciences, the humanities and natural sciences at the University of Lapland and to enhance its visibility with the objective of establishing it as an internationally well-known and acknowledged research area,
  
• to become a central forum for academic and public lectures, discussions and events in the fields we represent,
• to render the university's own practices more socio-ecologically sustainable.
  

Coordinators:

Postdoctoral Researcher Áile Aikio, aile.aikio(at)ulapland.fi
Postdoctoral Researcher Mikko Äijälä, mikko.aijala(at)ulapland.fi

How to live with waste?

Waste is widely recognised as one of the most urgent environmental and social problems faced by humanity today. Despite ever-more efficient reuse and recycling, the amount of waste has not diminished considerably, rather the opposite. This makes households primary units of waste management.

Mundane materials such as product packaging, grass clippings, furniture, clothing, bottles and cans, food scraps, newspapers, appliances, consumer electronics and batteries turn to waste as they travel through household practices. We ask: How is waste enmeshed in everyday lives, economies, policies and the sociocultural order?

Discover the Waste Society project: wastesociety.com

Alternative narratives for the age of the Anthropocene

In their multidisciplinary book Ethics and Politics of Space for the Anthropocene intended for international audiences, researchers Emily Höckert, Afroja Khanam, Outi Rantala, Tarja Salmela, Tiina Seppälä and Anu Valtonen envision alternative narratives for the age of the Anthropocene – particularly ones that emphasise the significance of localised and situated knowledge.

The book outlines new and radical ways of addressing the environmental crisis. It presents empirical studies from various contexts, highlighting the potentiality of non-Western knowledge, concepts and categories as well as recognising the role of multispecies entanglements in addressing the crises of the age of the Anthropocene. The book offers more sustainable and context-specific ways of examining and discussing the global environmental crisis. It offers critical engagement with the debates around the Anthropocene by challenging the dominant techno-rational agenda that often prevails in socio-political and academic discussions.

Further information on the publication is available here.

Caring tourism?

Tourism has traditionally been understood as taking a break from everyday responsibilities and seeking new experiences outside the context of everyday life. At the same time, tourism is known to be part of the consumer culture that is pushing – and exceeding – the limits set by our planet. In the Nordic welfare states, tourism is no longer luxury, but it has become part of the everyday: we fly often – and to faraway destinations. We are also welcoming more and more travellers and attracting new markets. What are the limits to the growth of tourism?

The Envisioning Proximity Tourism with New Materialism project adopts a multisensory approach to tourism. It envisions the future of tourism as based on caring and taking care, and the human being as embedded in nature – as relational. The project is underpinned by a feminist, new materialist theoretical framework. The theoretical, philosophical and methodological foundations of the project lie in our northern natural environments. The project provides new openings regarding alternative futures of tourism both in the academic field of Tourism research and in a variety of multidisciplinary arenas in society.

Further information on the project is available at: ilarctic.com