| Content and Methodology |
Content, Methodology, and Selection
Content
The aim of the workshop is to foster creative methods in Arctic research, education, and communication. We want to give students the opportunity to understand how creative methods from the humanities can inform practitioners across the arts and sciences through exploring, testing, and failing. The workshop will serve as a testbed for the co-creation of interdisciplinary projects grounded in the participants’ own ideas. By the end of the course, students will publish their collaborative work through a new publication channel at UiT, Septentrio Creative.
Methodology
The workshop builds on methods developed during the blended intensive programme “Integrating Co-creativity into Research, Education and Science Communication” and connects to UArctic Congress Session 6, “Creating and Communicating Arctic ArtScience,” organised by the UArctic Thematic Network on Environmental Humanities.
Key competencies and knowledges developed by the activity: co-creative methods, critical thinking, knowledge into action, social impact, Indigenous knowledges, storytelling.
Selection
This workshop is open to students from fields within the arts, humanities, and sciences. Please provide a short letter of motivation as well as your CV. All levels of students are welcome to apply, but Master’s and PhD students will be given priority. Eligible participants will receive 3 ECTS for this activity.
INFORMATION FOR PARTICIPANTS (updated and added post participant selection)
Introductory Thoughts
Doing and Communicating Research with Creative Methods brings together doctoral and master’s researchers from across the EUGLOH alliance for a week in Tromsø to learn from one another.
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 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, objecthandling, 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 made. You are invited to bring your own disciplinary tools into creative spaces to notice 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 we cannot yet fully imagine.
Lilli Mittner
Academic Coordinator, UiT’s Centre for Arctic Humanities.
Programme
The program is designed with contributions from: Craft-lab, EnvPhil, ArcArc, EnvHum, SAMFORSK, CNN and the University Kitchen Garden at UiT The Arctic University of Norway
24 August: Online seminar (13:15–14:00 CET)
[31 August: Travel day]
Tue. Sep. 1st - Árdna | Breivklia
09:00 — Intro: What do creative methods in ArtScience do and why do they matter for planetary health?
09:15 — Getting to know each other: share your methods
10:00 — What makes a good question? A Socratic workshop
- This session invites participants to sit with a deceptively simple question: what makes a question good? Rather than treating enquiry as a tool to extract answers, we'll explore questioning as a practice in its own right — one that can open rather than close, unsettle rather than resolve. Drawing on the Socratic tradition of dialogue and structured probing, we'll practice questioning assumptions, evidence, and viewpoints together, while resisting the pull toward premature answers. The aim is not mastery of a technique, but cultivation of a disposition: staying curious, comfortable with not-knowing, and attentive to how a question is framed as much as what it seeks. Drawing from the Books of Questions practice, participants will leave with questions rather than conclusions.
12:00 — LUNCH
13:00 — UiT’s Kitchen Garden
13:30 — Archaeology in action
- Archaeology is a discipline of intersections. Its engagement with material culture, from tiny artefacts to whole landscapes, means it draws on methods from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. And because material remains are both anthropogenic and natural, archaeologists study the present and recent past alongside the deep past. Three workstations in our laboratory on the UiT campus put this into practice: objects from a Second World War prisoner-of-war camp in Finnmark, Sami, Kven and Norwegian artefacts, and a live demonstration of XRF analysis or other research techniques.
15:00 — BREAK
19:00 — Social event in town
Wed. Sep. 2nd - Arctic University Museum | University Library
09:00 — Co-creative objecthandling: Do you see what I see?
- This object-handling session will be centered around objects from the Sami Collection at Arctic University Museum. We will follow the manual “Do you see what I see?” developed by UiT's Centre for Arctic Humanities in collaboration with the Museum of Artistic Process at Lund University. The purpose is to learn from each other and create new ideas, knowledge, and evidence through interaction and collaboration, and across different research fields, ages, genders, backgrounds, and ways of knowing.
11:00 — Walking into questions
- What happens when we walk not to arrive, but to wonder? In this session, we take our Books of Questions outdoors. Moving slowly and attentively through a mix of spaces – shorelines, streets, buildings, places of gathering and memory – we let the place itself speak to us. Rather than seeking answers or explanations, we practise noticing: What here puzzles you? What did you expect, and what unsettles that expectation? What question could only be asked here? The Question Walk is inspired by the soundwalks developed by the research project Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North, and by CRAFT Research Lab's activity "Walking with the Arctic: From now to next," implemented with international students in September 2025 in Cambridge Bay/Iqaluktuuttiaq, Nunavut, Canada, as part of the Arctic Future Pathfinders course.
13:00 — LUNCH
14:00 — UiT’s historical map collection
- UiT’s historical map collection consists of more than 150 rare maps depicting the High North and the Arctic from as early as 1482 and up to the 1800s. The majority of the maps were acquired from a private collection housed in a deconsecrated church building in the small and remote fishing village of Gjesvær, close to the North Cape. Together, we will explore the potential, possibilities, and limitations of using digitised versions of historical maps of the Arctic in research and outreach activities.
16:00 — BREAK
19:00 — Social event in town
Thu. Sep. 3rd - Simfish Lab
09:00 — Co-creative writing session. Capturing the week’s thoughts, experiences, and provocationsLaying the foundations for a published output for UiT's Septentrio Creative journal.
13:00 — Walking into the Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden
14:00–16:00 — Continue thinking, writing, editing
Fri. Sep. 4th - FF Beret Paulsdatter | Balsfjord*
08:00 — Daytrip to the fjords (meet at Hansjordnesbukta)
- Weather and technology permitting, we will embark on a biological field trip to the sheltered waters of the sound in which Tromsø island lies, and to the neighbouring fjord, Balsfjord. Using a variety of methods, we will dive into and explore the fascinating creatures that inhabit these waters. We will learn how organisms with bones, eyes, and tentacles thrive, and how others manage to live just as well without them – while interacting to form communities and ecosystems. Between stops, we will squeeze in some time for stories and tall tales about fishing, along with some casual chats about how food, wood, movies, and other things can spark creative ideas.
ca. 18:00 — Dinner. Catch of the day
[5 September: Travel day]
*Please note that the weather in the Arctic can be unpredictable. In the event of inclement weather, an alternative programme for this day will be put in place.
NOTE: All activities, including the online seminar, are obligatory. 31st August and 5th September are considered travel days. |
