Nordic Summer University

From the 28th of July until the 3rd of August 2022 we had the privilege to get together to read, write, think, converse, and share at Rønningen Folkehøgskole, as part of the Nordic Summer University Summer Session.  We started our days with writing exercises. After the first fika of the day we read out loud together, a mix of workshops and paper presentations filled our afternoons.  What does it mean to write together?  Writing together can mean writing in the…

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A workshop called “Looking For Personal Connections With The Place” took place on July 31, organised by Circle 10 and Emilia Plichta. The central idea of the workshop was to visualise our connections with the new place. In order to find them, various tools where used, for example, mapping, drawing, photographing, etc. Creating a visual trace of us being at Rønningen folkehøgskole became quite an exciting task to memorize our presence and turn it into our history.

Why is it that we want to act in favour of the environment but end up compromising our believes and use e.g. one-way cups for our daily coffee to go? Why is effective climate action somehow not happening effectively for each of us, even if we have strong moral instances that tell us how to act environmentally friendly?My colleague Woochang Choi and myself started a discussion about these questions, as we wanted to better understand the root-causes of climate action…

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This reading is the transformation of a project that first was realized in 2014, among a group of civil rights activists from Eastern Europe. It started out from a poem by Ukrainian author Tanya-Mariya Litvinyuk. Here, Ms. Litvinyuk actually takes part at the NSU gathering, through a sound recording; her voice is heard from the laptop at the beginning. Then follows an English translation, read by Dr. Lucy Lyons; her reading proceeds with ten single words. These words were chosen…

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This year Circle 7 organised a different summer symposium in Oslo. We tried to focus on a few research questions, which guided us throughout the symposium, and which were approached by each participant in different ways. We looked together at what knowledges can our practices create or help to create and what methodologies we employ in our research, through the lens of phenomenology. The multiple answers to these questions were explored as experience, looking at embodied memory, how layering occurs…

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On August 3, after all of the study activities, football match took place. A one sided affair which they won 17-0.

“My experience of the NSU is the serendipitous benefit of the informal conversations with those sharing the time between sessions to share feelings that share the same interest in what turned up unexpectedly during those conversations. Unexpectedly. Taking some time to articulate some comments that often turn out to be helpful spiraling around those ‘what turned up’ phenomena. Priceless.” Bill Thompson, study circle 8,“Futures of Education, Cultural Diversity, Imaginations and Collective Transformations in Time of the Anthropocene” “For me, Nordic…

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All of the activities of Circle 10 during Summer Session 2022 were dedicated to heritage studies. A board game’s form was chosen as a tool to reflect changes with Curonian Spit, where the advancing sands captured entire villages and their inhabitants were trying to resist. One example of burried village is reflected in the poem “Sunken Village” by Ludvikas Reza, where the death of a place was discovered. In contrast, Nida is an example of a survived settlement, which changed…

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DANCES WITH WOLVES The Nordic Summer University was born in the 50s as one of the pioneering institutions on interdisciplinary scholarship, joining artistic expression, academic research and a cross-disciplinary profile. Its organizational structure, discussion style and proposals format are strongly influenced by Grundtvig, a 19th century Danish philosopher of pedagogy, who developed the concept of Folkhögskola. The researcher on Aesthetics, Dance Philosophy and Gender Studies Victoria Mateos de Manuel was hosting the session in order to introduce an interdisciplinary discussion…

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Ever since I joined the NSU, I have gradually come to feel like a member of an open, supportive environment where I can develop and test out ideas with academics, non-academics, and students on different levels. It is a unique and warm atmosphere with a multitude of friendly people, who are sharing project ideas, research results, chats, memories, and good laughs throughout the sessions. My impression is that here is where people can develop new, creative ideas and projects in…

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