In this study circle, we nurture a diversity of practices for mutual learning and knowledge creation through conversation and play with the “more than human”. We build a community of practice, where we create ‘playgrounds’, ‘ephemeral ponds’ or spaces of not knowing, which are focused around prompts and themes for especially young scholars to experience and test methods, and examine afterwards through their own frameworks/theories. These spaces aim to instil opportunities to grow epistemological humility and inner pathways toward responsibility.

Next events:

Learn more about the next symposia and find the calls for papers, poems and practices for each symposium.

ECO-MYTHOLOGY2026: Call for contributions for

our online NSU winter symposium 2026

Co-create an eco-mythology with us in the weekend of 17-18 January 2026

Co-create an eco-mythology with us in the weekend of 17-18 January 2026

Hosted by the Nordic Summer University Study Circle: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices with/in the More-than-Human World

In the northern hemisphere, winter marks a threshold in the yearly cycle—a time of stillness, reflection, and renewal. After the twelve silent nights around midwinter, when traditions like Burns Night in Scotland and apple wassailing in England remind us of our deep entanglements with lands, seasons, and stories, we warm ourselves with myths and imaginations. The timing of this gathering is no coincidence: it is a moment to listen for other stories that might guide us into futures of mutual learnings, becomings and belongings.

This online symposium asks:

Why do we need new myths—or renewed myths—for living well together with the more-than-human worlds?
How can eco-mythology inform our practices?
Which learnings and practices contribute to the co-creation of an eco-mythology?

Our Objective
The symposium invites scholars, artists, educators, and practitioners to join in co-creating an eco-mythology. Through papers, performances, poetry, and dialogue, we will explore how mythic imagination, especially from Nordic and Baltic traditions, can open educational possibilities for futures where all beings may thrive. Together, we will experiment with collective practices and tools (such as MiroBoard, Photovoice), establish shared goals and rules, and invite mythic thinking as a form of transformative learning and planting autoethnographic seeds for later collaborative autoethographic explorations in the summer symposium 2026 in Latvia.

Themes & Questions

We invite diverse contributions—academic papers, creative performances, poetry, rituals, and prayesr—that engage with (but are not limited to) the following:

Rewilding fairytales and myths: bringing dormant myths and folktales back to life. Which Nordic or Baltic folktales and myths can help us reimagine education and community today? Which myths are dormant and might need to be rewilded? How might reimagining mythology contribute to ecological learning practices that extend beyond the human?
Ecofeminist retellings and revisionings: renewing stories from feminist and ecological perspectives. How can ecofeminist retellings, ecosexual perspectives, or re-storied fairytales heal a worldviews of separations and nurture interdependences?
Speculative and science fiction: imagining feminist futures that center the more-than-human worlds.
Rituals, ceremonies, folklore, and codes: weaving biocultural heritages with new narratives to shape a living eco-mythology.
Seasonal, place-based storytelling and poetry: practices of education and imagination for children and adults alike.

Selection Criteria
In shaping the program, priority will be given to:

Eco-mythologies (re)rooted in the Nordic and Baltic context, drawing on regional folktales, landscapes, and traditions.
Contributions from members of our study circle, with a minimum of two-thirds of the available timeslots reserved for participants of the Winter and/or Summer Symposium in 2025 and those planning to join us in Latvia in Summer symposium 2026..

By engaging with myth and ecology together, we aim to. experiment with collective wisdom, sharing practices of transformative learning, and cultivating stories that reimagine education and communities for futures where all can thrive.

Background and format

This symposium is not a conventional online academic event. Instead of rushing through a series of presentations with small Q&As, we follow a “less is more” approach. A red thread will be introduced in the opening session and carried through the whole gathering, allowing spaces for resonance and reflection.

Sessions are designed like tapas, small, varied, and nourishing offerings. Presenters will later be re-invited into a collective conversations, our shared cauldron of potions and poultices, where all contributions meet and transform together.

We also respect the vampiric drain of Zoom. Between sessions, we take long breaks and encourage participants to step outside for mouvements. Some pauses will come with invitations, such as using photovoice to capture images of eco-mythology in your local environments. A shared MiroBoard will remain active throughout, serving as a collective canvas of myth-making.

This symposium is part of the ongoing work of our Nordic Summer University study circle on the Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices with/in the More-than-Human World.

In our Winter and Summer Symposiums circles, we play with the idea of oikos (home, eco-) and each symposium turns around a different keyword. During the last summer symposium in Finland, we explored economy. This winter, we bring in eco-mythology (mythos: narrative), an invitation into myth, ecology, and transformative learning, next to eco-nomy in our ephemeral pound.

Tentative programme 17-18 January 2026

Timezone: Brussels time (CET).

Some parts of the programme are already planned. This call is for filling the empty (marked in red) timeslots.

Timeslot CEST	Saturday 17 January	Sunday 18 January
09.00-10.30	09.00-09.30: Welcome, soft landing and intro topic, objectives, rules and the cauldron – by coordinators Heide, Wendy, Lisa, Vitalija 09.30-10.30: Ecomythology: Why, how, what?Short presentation of Flowing with Eglė’s Ecomythology: Restor(y)ing the Baltic Sea – by Wendy (coordinator)	3 presentations of (future) academic papers Focus: Practices and methods for learning and transformation through rewilding self, spaces, language and ecoliteracy research for life supporting economies
11.00-12.00	Invitation to go outdoors, bring a camera and do photovoice of the word: Eco-mythology	Invitation to go outdoors – Heide and Vitalija (coordinators) – individual walk inspired by social permaculture of Starhawk
13.30-15.00	Storytelling practice moderated – by Vitalija, Heide and Lisa (coordinators) – Warm Data Lab with more-than-humans – People Need People and Plants (including vegetal)	1 workshop
16.00-17.30	3 presentations of (future) academic papers Focus: Reimagining education by rewilding Nordic and Baltic folktales and myths and ecofeminist retellings foregrounding the more than human world	Looking into the cauldron and dreaming an ecomythology for the Nordic and Baltic region: everyone (presenters and listeners) is invited to give feedback on presentations, workshops and the photovoice outcomes – moderated by Wendy
19.00-20.00	Wassailing (Eco-poetry and dreaming) over warm apple cider/tea… – by Anika Spindelman	Oral storytelling session (poems, short stories, prayers…)

Key dates:

Submission of your proposal: 31 October 2025
News about acceptance and first programme: 30 November 2025
Registration winter symposium: 01 Dec- 06 January 2026
Online symposium: Saturday 17- Sunday 18 January 2026

Pricing

We work with 3 prices. A ticket needs to be purchased via NSU webshop .

40 euros, for presenters or listeners without an income
70 euros, for presenters or listeners with an income
100 euros, for listeners who want to support the volunteers

The money will cover …

NSU membership for 2026: 30 euros. This NSU membership fee is used for paying the NSU website and other overhead costs.
Volunteer reimbursements

What do you get?

Access to a platform, network and collective wisdom for mutual learning
Free PDF of an upcoming book chapter Flowing with Eglė’s Ecomythology: Restor(y)ing the Baltic Sea
All participants become a member of NSU and can request a discount of 30 euros when you register for the summer symposium 2026 in Latvia (more information, call and registration in spring 2026).

How to Apply

Send your proposal (max 1000 words / 2 pages, including visuals) by 31 October to: wendywwuyts@gmail.com and vitalija.ppetri@gmail.com

Please include:

Title of your presentation / performance / contribution
Short bio (max 200 words) + reflections of your relations you have with the more-than-human world – please fill out the questionnaire
What does eco-mythology mean to you? Add an example of how it shows itself to you or how/when/where you notice it.
What will you share during the winter Symposium? Description of your transformative learning practice(s) with/in a more-than-human world you propose to experience during Ecomythology2026 symposium.
Practical details → How much time do you need? (30–90 min, teams of 2–3 welcome)
Inspiration → Key artistic and/or academic references

Creativity is welcome! Text, drawings, photo images, and poetic formats can all be part of your proposal!

Reminder: please do not forget to fill out the questionnaire on your creative more-than-human practice(s). Your reflections will help us to better understand your work. Thank you!

On-line session Writing(with)Plants

Writing(with)Mugwort on 12 September 2025 at 14.00-16.00 CET

More on Writing(with)Plants practice by Wendy Woods here

Summer Session
Webbing, Winging and Weaving Economies
for Rewilding Academic and Organisational places

21–28 July, 2025, Jyväskylä, Finland

Life is made in relationshipping.

Communicating in shared nutrients, as trees

do, in the beautiful way to think of how our

communion might also be.


Life is 

an enormous conversation.


- Nora Bateson, Combining

In this circle during the summer session we will explore what life forces are guiding our learning practices with more-than-humans, especially focusing on processes of giving and receiving in connection to our relationships with gifts of time, energy, money and power.

How do we perceive terms of webbing, winging and weaving economies within more-than-human learning processes from our personal stories starting with “gaining our daily bread”. How other living organisms are invited or not invited to express their voices in on-going everyday conversations in our life paths, choices and experiences?

We will begin to look closer into flows of finance, investment and philanthropy to anticipate soils of rebirth. We will share observations of the landscapes of funding in a trans-gen(d)erational workshop with the aim of syncopating (sense of surprise and humour, Bayo Akomolafe) the existing rhythms of funding in academia and life generating impact investing towards possibilities of blended, slow finance, slowed-down inquiry that make space for “unusual business”.

Theme questions: What is money, finances, economies? How do they manifest in direct and indirect ways in our daily practices, starting with the familiar efforts made in reaching our daily food? What are diverse drivers within more-than-human transformative learning? What stories does finance tell and shape? In which stories do we participate and what stories do we create by applying or benefiting from certain fundings/supports/institutions? How are those funders/supporters/institutions being transformed or not by our more-than-human participation, exchanges and relationships? What are ways of resourcing each other? Where is potential for trans-gen(d)erational, trans-cultural, trans-species relationship creation? How funding is shaping/guiding or not our practices? What can we learn from communing with plants, fungi and inclusive finance systems? How more-than-human practices inside and outside academia are being weaved or not through financial and technological forces? What economies (poetic, market, family, community, caring, mothering, sharing, gift or some other) are shaping what financial flows? How might pleasure, joy and satisfaction play into transformative learning with more-than-humans shaping inclusive shared futures by honouring time, energy, value, mattering (Pershouse 2020)?

Call for participation: Please send us proposals for sharing your practices, short papers, poetry, story, art works reflecting on:

Interactions between our practices, funders/supporters/institutions and multiple participating species;
Observations how funding/support sources shape our creative practices;
Observations and experimentations nourished by different economies, relationships and ecologies;
Finance as our practice driver or inhibitor or factor having no influence on our creative work;
Participation and inclusion of plants, fungi and other humans and non- humans in finance schemes.

Deadline for your contributions: 1st May 2025, vitalija.ppetri@gmail.com and heidenjoy@gmail.com

Payment: The price range for the full week including lodging, meals, membership and the program. If you are a member of NSU already, you will get a discounted price, contact arrangement committee (arrkom@nsuweb.org) for more details.

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

▶️ References (click to open)

Arlander, Annette. 2025. “Pondering With Örö Pines: Talking With Trees As an Undisciplinary Method”. Plant Perspectives, January. https://doi.org/10.3197/

Bayo Akomolafe | Becoming-black: On White Syncopation at the End of the World, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dca_1WDxVoY

Nora Bateson, 2023. Combining, Triarchy Press.

Tim Ingold on the Future of Academic Publishing, https://allegralaboratory.net/interview-tim-ingold-on-the-future-of-academic-publishing/

Tim Ingold, 2023. The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, Polity Press.

Monica Gagliano, Ecological Reparation: Resonant Earth, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t66Z5nKvIjU

Jenny Grettve, 2024. Mothering economy, Jenny Grettve Studio.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Burgoyne, 2024. The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, Scribner.

Lawrence, A. M., 2022. Listening to plants: Conversations between critical plant studies and vegetal geography. Progress in Human Geography, 46(2), 629-651. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03091325211062167

Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers, eds. (2022) Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice, Duke University Press.

Pershouse, D. (2020). Other Species are Essential Workers, Whose Economies Enfold Our Own: Is human society collapsing because we don’t recognize the work and intelligence of other species? Published in: The Regenerative Economy Collaborative.

Timothy Morton, 2024. Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology, Columbia University Press.

Dirk De Wachter, Never satisfied? This is why https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXkn70c-5G4

On-line session Writing(with)Plants

Writing(with)Spruce trees on 29 January 2025 at 19.00-21.00 CET

More on Writing(with)Plants practice by Wendy Woods here

On-line Warm Data Lab “People Need People”

30 January 2025 at 15.00-17.00 CET

offered within the program of the international conference “Care, Aesthetics, and Repair” hosted by University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, the Netherlands

Winter Session “Re-rooting and restor(y)ing academic spaces”

21-22 March, 2025. Denmark: Isle of Fyn

From mud to meal, we practise novel ways of tasting food and becoming. We explore dampness of old cellars, cook root vegetables, taste bitterness, and sweetness, make food like 500 year-old ancestors.

Activities: One outdoor activity of 2-4 hours, e.g. a sensing walk from indigenous to modern (academia); sharing and giving feedback on talks, texts, films, images and stories; one writing(with) plant session of 2 hours.

About the location: The location is a small farm on Isle of Fyn, 40 min by car from Odense, Denmark.

Topics of our explorations:

Re-rooting and restor(y)ing academic spaces;
Re-rooting with the more-than-human-world through mud, mold, food…;
Reviving traditional farming techniques and wisdom;
Bioregional educational futures;
Post- and ecohumanist education;
Ecofeminist perspectives on academic spaces;
Queer ecology and academic spaces;
Educating(with)plants.

(This list is non-exhaustive. We are open for proposals of papers, poems, storytelling sessions, an outdoor practices… as long engagement with the more-than-human-world is in the core of the proposal.)

Submissions closed.

About Study Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-human World

“What if, instead of thinking of a theory of change being produced from an identified preferred goal or outcome, the focus instead was placed on the way in which a system becomes ready for undetermined change? Can unforeseen ready-ness be nourished? While linear managing or controlling of the direction of change may appear desirable, tending to how the system becomes ready allows for pathways of possibility previously unimagined.” – Nora Bateson (An essay on ready-ing: Tending the prelude to change)

“We have dreamed together about unpredictable directions, about midwifing new perceptions, about autistic cartographies that stray from the tried and tested. Taking seriously the insurgent premise that thought isn’t exclusively human, that the world is alive, and that the way we approach the crisis is speculatively part of the crisis, we have wondered what it might look like to truly ‘stay with the trouble’. “ – Báyò Akómoláfé

Aims and goals of the project:

This project addresses the crisis of separation and alienation between humans and the more than human world. This led to other crises, such as climate crisis, polarisation etc. Especially in posthumanist sustainability science, socio technological (ST) studies and gender studies, this crisis of separation has been studied for decades. To counter this, scholars have raised questions on practices of knowledge creation and learning, and experimented with various radical landscape engagement methods to foster transformative learning and care. Presencing our felt sense in relation to the more-than-human expands our window of perception, affecting knowledge management. This can open the academic fields to new ways of communication when engaging with the dominant discourse and changes who we can be in organisations (Wilmott 1993). This project proposes attention to process and a new ecology of communication in academic spaces.

However, academic spaces are part of a patriarchal system that reinforce the barriers that hinder these radical practices and curtail the potential of transformation. Knowledge is rooted in contexts, micro-particularities and specificities. Science constitutes but a layer of “expertise” yet it has acquired a monopoly of truth and power in the decision making processes of society. Replicating colonial patriarchal dogmatism and slow violence, science needs an update.

To address these patriarchal structures, this project weaves theories of different fields and knowledge systems, inspired by various scholars:

eco-feminists (Plumwood, Shiva, Haraway, Braidotti, Barad, Federici, Irigaray)
biosemioticians (Hendlin, Affifi)
plant thinkers (Gagliano, Marder, Aloi, Mancuso, Manning)
indigenous scholarship (Goodchild, Wall Kimmerer, Yunkaporta, Akomolafe).

They have paved the way for academia to become a place of encounter to explore identities of scholars as porous unfinished beings that are in continuous transformation.

In this study circle, we nurture a diversity of practices for mutual learning and knowledge creation through play with the “more than human”. We build a community of practice, where we create ‘playgrounds’ or spaces of not knowing, which are focused around prompts and themes for especially young scholars to experience and test methods, and examine afterwards through their own frameworks/theories. These spaces aim to instil opportunities to grow epistemological humility and inner pathways toward responsibility.

We see these academic spaces as “ephemeral ponds” of inquiry: how do we reshape learning organisations into a place that leaves space for life to evolve beyond the industrial techno-solutionary and media-marketable sci-craze gaze? What is sanctuary in academia? To whose needs are schools and institutions academia responding and how? What are the edges of organizations, where do they get stuck? Is academia a place for learning and expanding collective knowledge? What would it look like if academia were a place of composting scientific hubris and a place of mental health care? Can academia model eldership? What is the future of learning?

What if academia can be a place that expands – by bringing together the siloed fragments of scientific expertise into a space that is gesturing toward humility in light of the Not Knowing?

This study circle project invites academics and practitioners to meet on land and online. Each symposium will introduce current (re)search practices, such as forest bathing (Wuyts 2024), warm data labs, writing with plants. These practices are embedded in rigorous academic theories (Bateson, 2023; Akomolafe, 2023; Morton, 2024; Manning, 2022; Roy, 2018; Sehgal, 2024). Through connecting transdisciplinary academic approaches with the deeply personal, ancestral/historic, place- and context-based embodied experiences, we deliberately invite other species to our own human cultural contexts.

Shared vision for 2027

By the end of the circle, we, as a diverse team of learners, have united in our conspiring so that we begin to see the more-than-human and bio-neuro-cultural diversity in general as our greatest allies, both in nourishing all forms of life, cooling the planet, regulating our nervous systems, and bridging between cosmologies.

Sign up to our internal newsletter:

To follow the circle and/or updates about the symposia, please sign up to our mail list, especially for NSU circle 5. Every month, we sent a short update. You can sign up for our mailing list by clicking here or scan this QR code:

Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri

Coordinator Study Circle 5

Wendy Wuyts

Coordinator Study Circle 5

NORDIC SUMMER UNIVERSITY

Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-human World

Next events:

ECO-MYTHOLOGY2026: Call for contributions for

our online NSU winter symposium 2026

Co-create an eco-mythology with us in the weekend of 17-18 January 2026

Background and format

Tentative programme 17-18 January 2026

Key dates:

Pricing

What do you get?

How to Apply

Further reading

On-line session Writing(with)Plants

Summer Session
Webbing, Winging and Weaving Economies
for Rewilding Academic and Organisational places

On-line session Writing(with)Plants

On-line Warm Data Lab “People Need People”

Winter Session “Re-rooting and restor(y)ing academic spaces”

About Study Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-human World

Aims and goals of the project:

Shared vision for 2027

Sign up to our internal newsletter:

Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-human World

Next events:

ECO-MYTHOLOGY2026: Call for contributions for

our online NSU winter symposium 2026

Co-create an eco-mythology with us in the weekend of 17-18 January 2026

Background and format

Tentative programme 17-18 January 2026

Key dates:

Pricing

What do you get?

How to Apply

Further reading

On-line session Writing(with)Plants

Summer SessionWebbing, Winging and Weaving Economiesfor Rewilding Academic and Organisational places

On-line session Writing(with)Plants

On-line Warm Data Lab “People Need People”

Winter Session “Re-rooting and restor(y)ing academic spaces”

About Study Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-human World

Aims and goals of the project:

Shared vision for 2027

Sign up to our internal newsletter:

Summer Session
Webbing, Winging and Weaving Economies
for Rewilding Academic and Organisational places