Location: Jyväskylä, Finland 
Dates: 21–28 July, 2025 
Deadline for applications: 1 March

Our CFP in Brief

We warmly invite applications to our Study Circle “Praxis of Social Imaginaries” Winter Symposium in Sigtuna Sweden. This community operates within the Nordic Summer University and sets out to foster a platform for trans- and inter-disciplinary research. By bringing people from various disciplines and fields of artistic work together into shared laboratories of praxis, we aim to create a transformational learning environment. 

This study circle has visited texts dealing with the Mongol empire, Asia, Africa and Central America. We now turn our gaze towards the Indigenous homelands of the North. In this last and final symposium of Praxis of Social Imaginaries, we turn to the writings of José de Acosta (1540-1600). Theologian Willie James Jennings writes in his The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010), that the reason for the Western Church’s difficulty in grasping its deep involvement in the formation of the modern racial condition fully is due to the distorted social imaginary that was formed when the first theologians and conquistadores passed over the Atlantic to conquer the “New World”. One of the leading theological voices in re-imagining the world after the textual authorities - both biblical, theological and philosophical - had been questioned and altered through the experiences in the “New World” was the Jesuit pater José de Acosta. Jennings describes that Acosta's Historia Natural y Morales de las Indias (1589) earned him the title “the Pliny of the New World”. Historia was one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the Americas for its time, widely translated and spread across Europe. According to Jennings, Acosta's treatment of creation and description of new ways to imagine the doctrine of creation in relation to the Christian presence in “the New World” came to alter European consciousness for centuries.

To inform critical engagement with this claim, we will invite symposium participants to a series of Zoom sessions to contextualize Acosta’s work through exploration of sixteenth century Indigenous codices that narrativized Spanish colonisation (El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala and the Codex Aubin, for example).

How can you participate?
Send us a short bio with your name, information about yourself, your home institution/organisation, your artform or area of research and a short motivation as to why you want to participate. If you would like to facilitate a session or present artwork during the study circle, please include further information in your email about your plans. The options for participation are as follows:

• Lead reading sessions in a workshop format: Give us a small idea about how you would want to lead a reading session of either 30 minutes or max 1,5h.
• Lead an intervention or artistic presentation for our community that is connected to the topic of this symposia or transdisciplinary learning: Give us a short description of your proposed performance talk or workshop related to the themes of Olaus Magnus writings and/or our working methods.
• Student Participant: You can also participate in this transdisciplinary reading, listening and storytelling work by being an active member of the community. Please indicate if you intend to work towards credits or if you are part of the students and researchers from Åbo Akademi that are taking part in the course Social Imaginaries and Transdisciplinary Learning.

When sending in your bio, please indicate which kind of participation you are wishing to contribute with and what your practical needs with this setup are.

Scholarships and Grants
Please also let us know by 1 March 2025 if you will seek institutional support for participation, accommodation and travel costs or if you would want to be considered for a scholarship. The earlier you send in your request, the better the chances will be for us to work with you to secure scholarships! People with institutional placement in the Nordic/Baltic region are given priority in scholarships as we have funders supporting Nordic collaborations.

Scholarship: exclusively for Nordic/Baltic students
Grant: inclusive for all other students and people in need, also non-Nordic participants.
If you would like to apply for a scholarship and/or grant, the relevant documents need to be sent to coordinators at the email praxis.social.imaginaries@gmail.com with the following:

• Full name, e-mail and citizenship/country of residence
• Current academic status and affiliation (if applicable)

Who can participate?
The Nordic Summer University (NSU) is open to all who want to engage in transdisciplinary and mutual learning under the values of equality and openness. You can be a student at bachelor's, master's, or doctoral level, and you can be a researcher, a scientist, an artist or work in a cultural or other third sector organization. Our study circle is explicitly open to people of all faiths. As a community investigating historical and living cosmologies, we are welcoming to Indigenous and artistic research with spiritual dimensions.

What do we offer?
First and foremost, we offer a platform for learning and collaboration.

For scholars, we plan for joint publications in open-access peer reviewed journals. And for artists and academics who want to collaborate, we will organise events where your works can be disseminated to the public. We have partnered up with forums like aboagora for presenting arts and science collaborations.

For students, we can offer: 5 ECTS points. If you are an MA or PhD student, active participation in this Winter Symposium can afford you 5 ECTS points. If you further study at Åbo Akademi University (or any other Finnish university under the JOO sopimus), further information is coming.

About Our Approach to Transdisciplinary Research

In transdisciplinary research scholars create collaborations with artists and activists in ways in which all are equal partners in a joint endeavor to study and change complex problems. In interdisciplinary research, scholars come together with researchers from other fields than their own, in order to establish collaborations where complex phenomena can be approached from various angles at the same time. Both trans- and inter-disciplinary research requires time and in-depth work in order to become truly fruitful. This study circle wants to provide room for these kinds of processes. The central method toward that end is the reading of medieval traveling accounts. We follow European theological elites as they and their learned scholarly communities encounter “Others” on their borders as well as within their lands. We will also be studying the Indigenous epistemologies, relationships to lands, nature and cultures, and social change.

About Our Incorporation of Indigenous-centered Research Protocols

In alliance with the ethical guidelines of Indigenous research this study circle is guided by the principals of Respect, Responsibility, Reciprocity and Consent that are formulated in the imagineNATIVE document ON-SCREEN PROTOCOLS & PATHWAYS: A Media Production Guide to Working with First Nations, Métis and Inuit Communities, Cultures, Concepts and Stories (2019) as well as the OFELAS - The Pathfinder Guidelines for Responsible Filmmaking with Sámi Culture and People (2021) by The Sámi Film & Culture Advisory Board. In the latter it is specifically articulated that culture, aesthetics, music, language, stories, histories and traditional cultural expressions are not things that can be the personal property of individual people nor given away as open resources. Rather, stories, languages, people, connection to space and place as well as specific crafts or arts are all interconnected and belong to a community which also includes ancestors and non-human kin (both spirits and animals). One of the aims of this study circle is thus to explore how we can approach historical documents and transdisciplinary research that respects Indigenous epistemological practices and wherein traditional forms of seeking knowledge are given space, time and resources.

The reading material at the center of our work is filled with depictions of cultures, peoples, lands and religious, artistic, culinary and sacred practices from times and places different from our own. Questions we envision will come up during the sessions are: What happens when we practice standing, sensing and listening with another in our explorations? What can we learn from encountering worldviews and scientific perspectives different from our own? What are the various media through which we can engage with texts and stories written hundreds of years before our time? What do we do if and when we find passages that are disturbing to us? How do we remain ethically grounded in practices that open for dialogue and critical scrutiny yet do not shut down or close off the possibilities of learning from what is uncomfortable? And how do we do all of this together with people from various different fields of study and cultural backgrounds that also have their own perspectives and contributions to how we can learn and explore together? These are some of the thematic questions we will pursue through-out this study cycle.

Ongoing research
In parallel with the different symposia of this study circle ethnographic fieldwork and artistic research is happening within the project Praxis of Social Imaginaries - a Theo-artistic Intervention for Transdisciplinary Research. The aim of that study is to follow and examine the processes of trans-disciplinary research that arise from the circle meetings as well as investigate the texts through transdisciplinary methods of engagement. Participation in the events of this study circle does not require participation in the ongoing research. However, due to GDPR regulations we want all the participants to be aware that research is conducted in collaboration with these events. We will thus also ask all participants to sign agreements on data collection. For those that are further interested in being collaborators in the ongoing investigation on trans-disciplinary research processes, informed consent agreements will be part of the procedures.

Financial support
We want to Thank the Polin Institute of Theological Research, Otto A. Malm foundation, Nordplus, Gustaf Packalén Minnesfond, Jubileumsfonden and Åbo Akademi University Foundation for supporting the research and events of this study circle.

Contact us with questions and send your application to: praxis.social.imaginaries@gmail.com

What does the program of the Summer Session look like? Here is an example from 2023. Details of the program in 2025 will be communicated later in spring by the Nordic Summer University Arrangement Committee (Arrkom). 

• Costs of the summer session for participants without scholarship or grant funds:
  (The below prices include room and board) 

• 650 EUR — volunteers (single bed in a twin room shared with another volunteer/participant)
• 450 EUR — scholarship receivers (stay in 4–5 people apartments)
• 850 EUR — single room
• 700 EUR — bed in a twin room
• 650 EUR — family room [per person]
• 1250 EUR — institutional price. Institutional price is intended for participants whose attendance is paid for by their institutions, e.g. trough research grants or similar dedicated funding
• 950 EUR — institutional price PhD
• 440 EUR — shared lodging (indoor camp rooms (shared accommodation))
• 400 EUR — camping