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

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. 

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About our circle

We see academic and other learning 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.  

Next events:

Learn more about the next symposia and find the calls for papers, poems and practices for each symposium. If you want to receive announcements in your mailbox, please sign up to our newsletter. We have around 130 subscribers of our circle’s newsletter (Update 11 February 2026).

Summer symposium 2026

Big keyword: Eco+Tones

24-31 July 2026, Saulkrasti, Latvia

Call for proposals and more background information

Deadline for applications: 1 April 2026

Photo by Vanda & Levi from Unsent Postcards

Eco+tones are zones of encounter. The prefix eco, from oikos, speaks of home: the place we inhabit, the watershed that holds us, the landscapes (human and more-than-human) that sustain life. Tones, by contrast, signal tensions: pain points, frictions, dissonances, but also cracks through which new possibilities can emerge. Tone also refers to the general character of atmosphere or attitude of a place, piece of writing, situation.


In ecology, ecotones are described as “environmental inner limits, zones of changing ecological landscapes and intermediaries, transition zones between adjacent ecosystems where species co-mingle” (Seidman, 2009). They can appear as halo clines, such as the meeting of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, or as liminal cultural landscapes like Satoyama, where human and more-than-human worlds intensely intertwine (Wuyts, 2024; Gan & Tsing 2018). Other human scholars have been looking into swamps as liminal queer spaces where weird things can happen (Chawrilska & Dolphijn, 2026; forthcoming). It is precisely in such layered spaces that conflicts, negotiations, and transformations most often unfold.

One of us (Wuyts, 2024) illustrated how forest bathing as a situated practice enabled her to experience Satoyama as an ecotone, not only as a site of knowledge creation, but also as a space for receiving care and feeling reinforced affordance for self-care. Similarly, in co-creation projects, several of us have encountered how messy, edgy, and emotionally charged this work can be, particularly when engaging with contested
boundary concepts such as health, nature, and knowledge (Selliah et al., 2022). Yet it is often through (-and not despite!) these tensions and pain points that transformation and expansion of the perceptual frames occur.

At the same time, we must remain attentive to the invisible costs of this care work: the emotional labor of holding tensions, navigating uncertainty, and translating pain into something generative. What does it take to stay with these submerged ecotones, and who bears the weight of that work?

The symposium invites scholars, artists, educators, designers, architects, farmers and other practitioners to join in co-creating, studying and learning together in spaces that honour edge work and tensions that may emerge, in experimenting and playing with landscape-engaging practices, and by supporting one another in personal and collective projects embedded within the larger ecotones of our worlds. Here, we explore ecotones not only as sites of friction, but as thresholds and methodologies (Denning, 2021) where new relations, insights and liberating
futures can take shape.

This week, we want to create a space to support each other, where we practice expressing needs, asking for help, receiving offered help or expressing gratitude for asked or offered help can be practiced. That is why we will design a programme with enough time for observing, noticing, reflecting, resting and processing, but also for your personal projects, play with your family and friends, and care-work.

Every morning, we would like to start with a nature-based practice (1,5 hour time slot). This can be a guided forest bath, a drawing session, a body movement course, a gratitude ceremony… or sitting outside, under a birch tree, and listening to the crickets. It can be very simple. That is why we encourage you to apply with a proposal of which practice you can facilitate in the morning. No worry, if you do not feel ready
to guide a practice yet, and rather want to join in our circle to get inspiration. After the coffee break, we have another 1,5 hour time slot. We would plan collective reading and editing of each other’s personal projects. After lunch, you can join sessions of other study circles, the general assembly, enjoy the Baltic Sea, do some writing, reading, foraging, relaxing… In the evening, there is a shared cultural programme for all the 10 circles of NSU.

Send your proposal (max 1000 words / 2 pages, including visuals) by 1 April 2026 to:
wendywwuyts@gmail.com and vitalija.ppetri@gmail.com

For more details >>

read the detailed call

Learn more about/from our previous symposia:

Winter symposium 2025, Sandholt, Island of Fun, Denmark, 20-21 March 2025

Bigger title: Re-rooting and restor(y)ing academic spaces

Photographs by Vitalija >>

Summer symposium 2025, Jyväskylä, Finland, 23-28 July, keyword: eco+nomy

Bigger title: Webbing, Winging and Weaving Economies for Rewilding Academic and Organisational places

Photographs by Vitalija >>>

Winter symposium 2026, online, 17-18 January, keyword: eco+mythology

If you are interested in exploring the concept of eco+mythology and be informed about more online symposia and outcomes, please sign up to a newsletter mail list that we started after this symposium.

sign up for the eco+mythology mailing list and newsletter

Summer Symposium 2026, Saulkrasti, 24-31 July

  • keyword: eco+tones
  • This will be updated in September 2026. 

Winter Symposium 2027

  • keyword: eco+???
  • The call will be published in September 2026.

Summer Symposium 2027

  • keyword: eco+???
  • The call will be published in January 2027.

Satellite events (online pre-events)

  • Online writing(with)plant sessions – read more here about the practice 
  • Online warm data lab  – a page or blogpost is coming soon

Online Warm Data Labs “People Need People”

Photo: ‘Seasonal Transitions’, still image from video, Tone Bjordam, 2021

Warm Data is contextual and relational living  information about complex systems. It doesn’t isolate variables or seek answers in one domain, but holds the complexity of many contexts simultaneously.

Warm Data Labs (WDLs) invite us to share stories and memories from our lives helping us notice inter-dependencies and generate understandings of systemic patterns, even for those with no previous exposure to systems theory. WDLs help us widen our vision of the many relationships that coexist in any living context, increasing our capacity to respond with care, new awareness and relational insight.

Join our online Warm Data Labs called People Need People, in which we will be tending together to the art of multispecies care across multiple contexts (economy, education, art, technology, culture, science, media, ecology, family, and others).  It is a space for simple, spacious, gentle, meaningful conversations that flow.  These experiences have been described as a “kaleidoscope of conversations”, containing enriching stories, vitality, and insight. They nourish the soul, transform the way we approach each other, plant worlds, care work, life, and our communities, and ultimately, create space for new relationships to flourish. They can even plant new seeds for community projects to renew and revitalise community life.

Our  conversations will include participants across diverse spheres of life, multispecies (re)search and care fields to discuss what is present for us as we explore our various questions we are carrying.

The space will be held by hosts trained in Warm Data Lab processes, developed by Nora Bateson and stewarded by the International Bateson Institute. These two-hour sessions are participatory, offering possibilities to converse in big groups and small groups. In each group you will meet a new set of people guided by question and different contexts. Whatever is alive in you in the moment, this space invites you to share that which wants to emerge.

Some resources for those considering joining the session:

Photographs by Vitalija >>

Some more background

“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 circle:

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. 

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

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