Course for PhD students: "Collectives of knowledge creation: recasting academic practices"

The course invites students to engage with scholars, artists and knowledge holders to explore and experiment with questions over what knowledge is. We will engage with the entanglements between Indigenous and academic knowledge, and ask what tensions and possibilities that lie in this meeting. How is the knowledge we need for a liveable future best created, by whom, and towards what ends?  

The course will be situated in Girjegumpi, the nomadic Sámi library of architecture, which at the time of the course will be a visitor of Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat. Girjegumpi will here be part of the Suialaa Arts Festival 2025, and the course program will be an integrated part of the library’s public festival program. It is co-organised by Girjegumpi’s main creator, the Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango and the research projects Birgejupmi and UrbTrans.

Interdisciplinary beyond the bounds of academia, the course will run over four days. The first course day will find place outside the Girjegumpi program and is dedicated to the creation of a safe space of learning between participants. The following three days are part of the Girjegumpi program, each of which will be organised around the materialities and practices of food procurement and preparation; skin work; and the uses of turf in architecture. As part of the course, we will engage with ‘walking pedagogy’ as a mode of learning with and through land and sea. Through such multimodal methods, the course explores the connections between art, land, healing, and Indigenous knowledge.

Throughout the course we will engage with literatures and discussions that seek to open the question of what appropriate knowledge creation is and should be, and on how such knowledges can be put into practice. When researching the Arctic, we ask, what modes of knowledge creation and what knowledge collectives do we need to engage in?

We take as our premise that Arctic lands are the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples. Arctic Indigenous peoples hold unique ways of knowing and living with land, water and resources, and these ways of knowing must be respected and acknowledged also by researchers. Rather than separate out different forms of “scientific” knowledge we aim to bind together practices across disciplines and ways of knowing.

To apply for the course, please write a motivational letter, no longer than two pages and submit this by July 1, 2025 and submit this to: tone.huse@uit.no

Practical information:

• Main lecturers: Britt Kramvig, Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Paarnaq Rosing Jakobsen, Joar Nango and Tone Huse.
• The course will yield 5 ECTS points
• Exam form: a reflection log (5-6000 words long) to be submitted by December 1, 2025.
• Students will receive a diploma from UiT The Arctic University of Norway, but must apply to their respective organisations/PhD programs to have the course approved as a PhD course.

Reading list (to be confirmed):

Adams, R., Den Elzen, E., Finbog, L. R., Folger, N., Grahn, C., & Hakovirta, J. (2024). ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ= Ruovttu Guvlui= Towards Home: Inuit & Sámi Placemaking.

Arke, P. (2017). Ethno-aesthetics. Afterall: A journal of art, context and enquiry, 44(1), 4-11.Awâsis, S. (2020). " Anishinaabe time": temporalities and impact assessment in pipeline reviews. Journal of Political Ecology, 27(1), 830-852.

Balto, A. ( 2015). THE SÁMI WAY – BIRGEN! THE TRADITIONAL ECOLOGICAL WORLD- VIEW (TEK). To be circulated.

Chartier, D., Guttorm, H., Kramvig, B., Kristoffersen, B., Riquet, J., & Steinberg, P. (2024). Decolonial cartographies: Counter-mapping in the Arctic. In The mediated Arctic (pp. 183-208). Manchester University Press.

Danbolt, M., & Pushaw, B. (2023). Institutional acknowledgements: Introduction to the special issue ‘The Art of Nordic Colonialism’. Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 92(2), 67-83.

Dankertsen, A. (2022). Avkolonisering av akademia fra et samisk perspektiv. Slagmark-Tidsskrift for idéhistorie, 86.

Dankertsen, A., & Kristiansen, T. G. S. (2021). “Whiteness isn’t about skin color.” Challenges to analyzing racial practices in a Norwegian context. Societies, 11(2), 46.

Graugaard, N. D. (2020). Arctic auto-ethnography: unsettling colonial research relations. In Collaborative Research Methods in the Arctic (pp. 33-49). Routledge.

Graugaard, N. D., & Høgfeldt, A. A. (2023). The silenced genocide: Why the Danish intrauterine device (IUD) enforcement in Kalaallit Nunaat calls for an intersectional decolonial analysis. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, (2), 162-167.

Graugaard, N. D., Pihl Sørensen, V. E., & Stage, J. L. (2025). Colonial Reproductive Coercion and Control in Kalaallit Nunaat: Racism in Denmark’s IUD Program. NORA-Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 1-16.

Haugdal, E. (2018). “It’s Meant to Decay”: Contemporary Sámi Architecture and the Rhetoric of Materials. The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture, 805-829.

Hauptmann, A. L. (2024). Food sovereignty in Kalaallit Nunaat. Food and Foodways, 32(4), 279-301.

Hill, S. M. (2017). The clay we are made of: Haudenosaunee land tenure on the Grand River (Vol. 20). Univ. of Manitoba Press.

Huse, T. (2024). Temporal displacement: colonial architecture and its contestation. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1-23.

Huse, T. & Mayfield, P. (2025). Active Past. Working paper. To be circulated.

Ingold, T., & Vergunst, J. L. (Eds.). (2008). Ways of walking: Ethnography and practice on foot. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..

Joks, S., Østmo, L., & Law, J. (2020). Verbing meahcci: living Sámi lands. The Sociological Review, 68(2), 305-321.

Keskitalo, A. I. (1994). Research as Inter-Ethnic Relations. Sámi Instituhtta. DIEDUT 7/1994. Available at: https://samas.brage.unit.no/samas-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2638028/Research%20as%20an%20Inter-Ethnic%20Relation%20-%20Alf%20Isak%20Keskitalo.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Kramvig, B., & Danbolt, M. (2024). Rehearsing Reconciliation: Frictional Dramaturgies and Postcolonial Moments in Ferske Scener’s" Blodklubb”.

Kramvig, B. and Salmela, T. in print. “When the land becomes the sea and the sea becomes the land: Disrupting processes of appropriation of Miärralándda”. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. 

Lea, T. (2020). Wild policy: Indigeneity and the unruly logics of intervention. Stanford University Press.

Mayfield, P. (2025). Technologies of Colonialism. Working paper. To be circulated.

la paperson, (2017). A Third university is possible. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517902087/a-third-university-is-possible/

Petersen, R. (1995). Colonialism as seen from a former colonized area. Arctic Anthropology, 118-126.

Simpson, A. (2020). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press.

Simpson, L., B. (2025). Theory of Water Nishnaabe maps to the time ahead. Alchemy by Knopf Canada.

Solbakken, B. A. (Ed.). (2022). Huksendáidda: arkitektuvra Sámis. Orkana forlag.

Steinberg, P., Baxter, R., Egan, E. S., Kramvig, B., Lehman, J., Winderen, J., & Winterling, S. M. (2025). Listening to/in the Field: Polyphony in the Exploring Arctic Soundscapes Project. GeoHumanities, 1-22.

Tuck, E. & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. Vol. 1, No. 1,2012, pp. 1–40

Verran, H. (2007). Metaphysics and learning. Learning Inquiry, 1, 31-39.

Watego, C. (2021). Another day in the colony. Univ. of Queensland Press.

Williamson, K. J. (2013). Inherit my heaven: Kalaallit gender relations. Arctic, 66(4), 500-502.

Wilson, S. (2020). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood publishing.

Østmo, L. et al. (2025). Colonial Struggle and the Infrastructures of Knowing: A Story from Sápmi. In: Medina, L. R., & Harding, S. G. (eds.) Decentralizing knowledges: essays on distributed agency. Duke University Press.