Northern Perspectives: A Community Co-Created Course on Local Knowledge, Methodologies, and Ethics

This transdisciplinary course aims to provide advanced knowledge and methods for researching multispecies landscapes and communities in the North to researchers already familiar with crafting, artistic, more-than-human, and/or multispecies approaches. Building on two previous courses offered at the University of Oulu (DP00AM96: New Perspectives on Human and Non-Human Landscapes in the North and DP00AT39: Arts of Noticing: Methods for Studying the Anthropocene), this course expands the knowledge and methodological repertoire by inviting dialogue with non-academic knowledge and methods. Through this dialogue, the course achieves its threefold objective. First, it offers participants the opportunity to further develop their theoretical knowledge, practical research skills, and ethical approach. Second, by fostering networks within and outside the university, it provides researchers—particularly those based in Oulu who come from abroad—the opportunity to anchor their studies in the context of Oulu, Northern Ostrobothnia, Finland, and the Arctic. This ensures their research is relevant to and conducted with the local community, producing situated and sustainable results that benefit the broader Arctic region. Finally, the course provides a platform to bridge local knowledge with global challenges, reflecting on the role of the local within the context of increasingly globalized research. Through hands-on lectures led by local craftspersons and nature-based entrepreneurs in the areas of cooking, preserving food, foraging, and handicrafts, this course incorporates insights from what (Western) academic discourses and teachings traditionally conceive of as borderlands and peripheries into the core of research, and brings culinary and crafting knowledge and practices, as well as multispecies and plant perspectives, into a space of dialogue. Cooking, preserving food, foraging, and handicrafts—traditionally associated with women, rurality, and often lower social status—have long been ignored by academic work. By incorporating these previously excluded diverse ways of being and knowing, the course poses the questions: What does it mean to pay careful attention to the local environment and communities and to come to know a place? How does paying careful attention create meanings that also connect to a globalized context? By asking these questions of those traditionally seen as on the periphery of academia and inviting researchers to engage with their ways of knowing and doing, this course encourages academic participants to embody what Despret refers to as “becoming amateur.” This promotes a practice of engaged and passionate inquiry that emerges from a place of not knowing, coupled with a willingness to learn from others and a commitment to justice. Building such dialogue breaks down both disciplinary and institutional boundaries, opening the university to innovative and more just ways of conducting research. This approach thus promotes the university values of “creating new,” “taking responsibility,” and “succeeding together.