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

Description

This transdisciplinary course offers advanced methods for researching landscapes and communities in the North, expanding into dialogue with non-academic knowledge and practices. The course integrates hands-on workshops led by local craftspersons and nature-based entrepreneurs in areas such as cooking, foraging, and handicrafts. Through these engagements, participants explore what it means to pay attention to place, reflect on the ethics of locality, and consider how local knowledge can inform global challenges. The course encourages researchers to “become amateurs” for engaged, justice-oriented inquiry, breaking disciplinary boundaries and fostering inclusive, community-anchored research.

Learning Outcomes

This course deepens participants’ theoretical, practical, and ethical research skills, particularly in relation to local collaboration and multispecies engagement. It encourages hands-on interaction with local communities, fostering reflection on how local knowledge and practices can inform and enrich academic research. Participants will explore the interplay between local and global perspectives, bridging community-anchored knowledge with broader sustainability challenges. The course also supports the development of communication skills and provides a platform for building both local and international research networks through collaborative, participatory, and interdisciplinary approaches.

Contents

This three-day course, co-designed with guest workshop leaders, explores diverse understandings of locality through theoretical and hands-on engagement. Each day includes a practical workshop led by local community members—focusing on sensory, seasonal, and walking-based techniques—followed by academic reflection sessions facilitated by University of Oulu researchers. The course critically examines concepts like “native” and “invasive,” and concludes with a panel discussion and collaborative reflection on ethical, inclusive, and sustainable approaches to co-creating local knowledge across human and more-than-human communities.

Study methods

The course consists of three days of intensive face-to-face activities and related independent study. The study methods include pre-readings and other preparations for workshops, such as keeping a food waste diary; participation in the activities; group discussions; reflection in portfolio-based assessment on applying learning into current and future research.

Teaching methods - toteutustavat

Contact teaching. (Guest) lectures as well as practical workshops by local knowledge holders and craftsperson's, panel discussions, case studies, facilitated discussions and reflections