Long list of new guests and contributors confirmed!


Guest and contributors will be posted as they are confirmed. May be subject to change up until the start of the conference.

 

Jenny Björklund [Professor, Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University – Sweden]

Photo: Mikael Wallerstedt

Jenny Björklund is a literary scholar and professor of gender studies. Her main research interests are motherhood and family studies, queer theory, cultural studies, and 20th and 21st century literature.

www.katalog.uu.se


Maja Bodin [Midwife and Postdoctoral researcher, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University – Sweden]

Maja Bodin is a midwife and PhD in reproductive health. Her main area of expertise is reproductive decision-making, which she studies from an interdisciplinary perspective (medicine, gender, sociology, history of ideas).

www.katalog.uu.se


Jan van Boeckel [Professor Art & Sustainability, Research Centre Art & Sustainability, Hanze UAS, Artist and Filmmaker – The Netherlands]

Jan van Boeckel is professor Art & Sustainability at Research Centre Art & Society of Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, the Netherlands. He started his career as a cultural anthropologist. With the passing of time, Jan increasingly focused his attention on both his own developing artistic practice and on the teaching of art – two orientations that eventually converged into the role of artist-educator. Jan has initiated and taken part in several research projects on the interfaces of where art and sustainability meet. Specializing himself in the new field of arts-based environmental education, he received his degree as Doctor of Arts in arts education at Aalto University, Helsinki, in 2013. In the past years he has worked in several Northern countries – among which Iceland, Sweden, Estonia and Finland. Each autumn, At the invitation of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Jan teaches the intensive course ‘Art and Sustainability Education’ in Lahemaa National Park. He regularly facilitates wildpainting courses across Europe, that aim to inspire participants to connect to nature through art making activities. As part of Tim Ingold’s “Knowing from the Inside” research project, Jan explored how a regenerative pedagogy would look if it would encourage teachers to be attentive to the participants’ “light in the eyes.” At Hanze UAS, Jan’s primary research interest is in how art can help us face the great challenges of our time, of which the ecological crisis in its many dimensions is the most pressing.

www.janvanboeckel.com
www.wildpainting.org
www.hanze.nl/nld/onderzoek/profielen/lectoren/jan-boeckel


Alexander Crawford [Analyst, facilitator and commentator, former – Sweden]

Alexander Crawford is a Stockholm-based analyst, facilitator and commentator. Trained as an economist, he has taken part in the sustainability conversation in Sweden and globally for over two decades, as consultant, scenario planner and designer and facilitator of numerous seminars, conferences and change processes (including as research director and lead program designer of the Tällberg Forum (2005-2013), CEO of the think tank Global Utmaning, and program manager at the Swedish Institute working with leadership development for sustainable business in developing countries).


Anita Goldman [Author, writer och publicist – Sweden]

Anita Goldman is a Swedish writer och publicist. She has published almost twenty books — fiction and non-fiction. She is presently working on a big book: Det vilda hoppets geografi (“The Geography of Wild Hope”) which is a very broad investigation into our(Western) civilization’s relationship to Nature. Goldman also contributes larger opinion-pieces to the foremost Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter. She is one of the few voices in mainstream media and culture that offers a thorough civilisatory critic of our society, focusing on the nuclear war culture and energy, on the threats to the very earth we stand on and live from, on the absurd way we manufacture food etc, but also on the healing that comes from being in touch with Nature and growing and the importance of awe and a spiritual grounding. Goldman is an impatient but avid grower of vegetables and perennials at her house at the south easternmost tip of Sweden, Österlen.


Johan Gärdebo [Historian and Postdoctoral researcher, Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University – Sweden]

Johan Gärdebo studies climate knowledge and decarbonisation policies as these interplay in local, national, and transnational settings, from late 1800s to the present. He is currently a Research Fellow at Clare Hall (2022–2025), associated with the Cambridge Centre for History and Economics and the Department of History of Science.

www.katalog.uu.se

Dougald Hine [Social thinker, Writer and Speaker, a school called HOME – Sweden]

Photo: Ingrid Rieser

Dougald Hine is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he has gone on to co-found a series of organisations including the Dark Mountain Project and a school called HOME. Together with Paul Kingsnorth, he is the author of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009). His latest book, At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies is published by Chelsea Green in February 2023.

He has given keynotes and talks on numerous platforms – from the European Commission and TEDx events to the back rooms of pubs and squatted social centres – and is a regular guest lecturer at universities, art and architecture schools across Europe. In 2012, Google invited him to São Paulo and Buenos Aires to speak at its Think Infinite! events, his work was featured as a case study in the EU’s Team Culture report on ‘the role of culture in a time of crisis’ and he was named by NESTA/The Observer in their inaugural list of ‘Britain’s 50 New Radicals’.

In 2015-16 he served as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s national theatre, bringing together a year-long artistic workshop on ‘the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change’. In collaboration with three Swedish playwrights, he wrote Medan klockan ticker (‘While the Clock is Ticking’), a play commissioned by the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, based on interviews with climate scientists about ‘what it’s like when the Anthropocene is your day job’. He is an associate of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University and sits on the advisory board for the Penn State University Press series, Ivan Illich: 21st-Century Perspectives.

Many of his books have been collaborations with visual artists, ranging from COMMONSense (2009) with Anne-Marie Culhane and Access Space to The Crossing of Two Lines (2013) with the Stockholm-based artist duo Performing Pictures. For Walking in the Void (2021), a collaboration with the glass artists Baldwin & Guggisberg, he contributed an essay in twelve parts, ’THE ASTEROID: An Anthropocene Whodunnit’.
After ten years as a director of the Dark Mountain Project, he handed on his responsibilities in 2019. His recent projects include Notes From Underground, a ten-part essay series for Bella Caledonia exploring the deep roots of the new climate movements, and The Great Humbling, a podcast which he presents with the futurist and ‘recovering sustainability consultant’ Ed Gillespie.

Originally from the northeast of England, Dougald is now settled in the small Swedish town of Östervåla where he and Anna Björkman are creating a school called HOME, ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture’. His latest writing is published on his Substack, Writing Home.

https://dougald.nu/


Enki Inkpen [Musician, poet, student Global Environmental History at Uppsala University, and course coordinator CEMUS – Sweden]

Enki Inkpen is a musician and poet, student of global environmental history at Uppsala University, and course coordinator at CEMUS. With CEMUS they have worked on four courses, including Perspectives on Climate Change: Ecopsychology, Art and Narratives, and they co-founded Art at the End of the World club. They are interested in the emotional disconnect between humans and their local nature, and how that relationship could be healed through engaged art, spirituality, and rewilding time with sound. They are hoping to do a PhD to further explore these topics, but in the meantime they can be found jumping in lakes and frolicking in forests.


Stephen Jenkinson [Author, Master of Ceremony, Culture Activist, Storyteller, Off-grid small-scale Farmer, Carver, Keeper of the Great Hall – Canada]

Jenkinson teaches internationally and is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School. For years, after apprenticing to a master storyteller as a young man, acquiring a master’s degree in theology from Harvard Divinity school and another in social work from the University of Toronto, Stephen Jenkinson led the palliative care department in a major Canadian hospital and was assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. He has worked extensively with caregivers, dying people and their families. Whilst sitting at the deathbeds of over a thousand people, he encountered again and again what he called a “wretched anxiety.” Rather than any one individual’s personal issue with dying, Jenkinson understood this as symptomatic of a cultural absence, a death phobia, a grief illiteracy. These experiences served to distil a number of questions: Has it always been this hard to die? When do we really begin to die, and what are we supposed to do then? How is it that grief is a skill, something to be learned and practised? Those questions and more spawned several books. He is the subject of the National Film Board of Canada feature length film documentary, Griefwalker (Dir.T. Wilson).

He is the author of Reckoning, co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson (2022), and A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015 and translated into Hebrew and Turkish), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching from 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – (a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002). He was a contributing author to Palliative Care – Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007). Lost Nation Road (Dir.I.MacKenzie) is a glimpse behind-the-scenes of a soulful mystery train. His Nights of Grief and Mystery world tours, with fellow Canadian singer/ songwriter Gregory Hoskins, are odes to wonder, love letters for the willingness to know endings. 2023 World Tour Dates: August 14, 2023 – Nights of Grief & Mystery 2023 Tour: Malmö, Sweden, and August 17, 2023 – Nights of Grief & Mystery 2023 Tour: Stockholm, Sweden.

https://orphanwisdom.com/

Henri Jumppanen [Photographer, journalist and poet – Finland]

Henri Jumppanen is a professional photographer and journalist who also writes poetry. Based in Joensuu, Eastern Finland.


Mikael Kurkiala [Author and Researcher, the Swedish Church, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala University – Sweden]

Mikael Kurkiala is associate professor of Cultural anthropology at Uppsala University and researcher at the Church Office. He is the author of, among other titles, In every drum beat the earth’s pulse: about the fear of differences of our time (Ordfront 2005) and When the Soul Goes into Exile: Modernity, Technology & the Sacred (Verbum 2019). He has also participated in several anthologies about the place of existential issues in contemporary society and is the editor of an annual anthology – Tidens tecken – (“Signs of the times”) published by Artos.

www.svenskakyrkan.se/forskning/publikationer/tidens-tecken


Isabella Lövin [Author, co-chair Friends of Ocean Action and former Minister of Climate and Environment, Minister for International Development Cooperation and Deputy Prime Minister – Sweden]

Photo: Kristian Pohl

Isabella Lövin is an author of Tyst hav – Jakten på den sista matfisken (“Silent Sea – The Hunt for the Last Fish”) (2007) and Oceankänslan (“The Ocean Feel”) (2022), co-chair of Friends of Ocean Action, regularly featured as columnist in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri, former Minister of Climate and Environment, Minister for International Development Cooperation and Deputy Prime Minister. Former EU-parliamentarian and journalist. Honorary doctor at SLU and World Maritime University.

www.weforum.org/friends-of-ocean-action


Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri [Transdisciplinary researcher at Brussels Health Gardens – Lithuania, Belgium, Sweden]

Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri is a pharmacist and transdisciplinary researcher. She studies how relationships with plants, nature medicine, nature-based health practices and traditional local knowledge contribute to human connectedness with nature and regeneration of health.


Juni Sinkkonen [Eco-psychologist, environmental activist, writer and facilitator – Finland]

Juni Sinkkonen is an eco-psychologist and environmental activist who writes, gives lectures and facilitates workshops on environmental emotions and deep ecological worldview. Based in Joensuu, Eastern Finland.


Isak Stoddard [PhD Researcher, Natural Resources and Sustainable Development, Uppsala University – Sweden]

Isak Stoddard is pursuing a PhD in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development at the Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University. In his current research he studies the imaginaries and temporalities underpinning regional climate and energy transitions within Sweden. His educational background is in engineering physics and over the past two decades he’s spent much of his time developing and supporting transdisciplinary approaches to higher education at the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS).

www.katalog.uu.se


Pella Thiel [Author, Activist and Educator – Sweden]

Pella Thiel is a maverick ecologist, activist and author who works with relational, systemic activism, change processes and leadership för a society in harmony with nature. She is a knowledge expert in the UN Harmony with Nature initiative and co-founder of swedish hubs of international networks like the Swedish Transition Network and End Ecocide Sweden. She also teaches ecopsychology and is a part of the eco-psychology/art/activist NGO Lodyn.