Strengthening Agency in the Pluriverse of the Academic Worlds: Highlights from UniPID and UNIFI annual seminars in Oulu.

On 5 November 2024, UniPID hosted its Annual Seminar on “Strengthening Agency in the Pluriverse of the Academic Worlds”. The seminar took place within the framework of the Finnish Universities' Rectors' Council’s (UNIFI’s) seminar on sustainability and responsibility at the University of Oulu. In case you’ve missed these events, you can find the most important takeaways here!

UniPID’S Annual Seminar 2024.

The Annual Seminar started with a panel discussion, titled "From globally relevant research to science diplomacy – In search of a Finnish approach to strengthening global academic partnership for a sustainable future" and it was chaired by Tiina Seppälä from the University of Helsinki. Afterwards, the participants had time to share their takeaways and discuss how to apply them in practice. To do justice to the topic of plurality, UniPID invited four wonderful panelists who each brought their very own perspective on the themes of equity and diversity in global collaborations.

Faith Mkwesha’s research focus lies within African studies, diversity and decolonial perspectives. After working in African higher education for many years, her own experiences in a joint Finnish research collaboration evoked her interest in decolonial perspectives:

“My previous teaching was on a very theoretical level but in this project, I experienced epistemic differences for the first time in practice. It caused a lot of misunderstandings.”

Nowadays, Faith has found a way to approach these differences through the African UBUNTU philosophy. UBUNTU offers conceptualizations on how different epistemologies can hold a constructive dialogue instead of competing. The idea is for all actors to come together as equals and contribute their own data, knowledge and perspectives to create something new.

Samuli Reijula is a lecturer in theoretical philosophy. He sees the strength of his work in prompting the right questions and conceptualizing a framework from which researchers can draw for their practical work. The themes evolve around different epistemologies, approaches and scientific communities.

While Samuli sees a strong need for Finnish academia to pay more attention to these topics, he also acknowledges that some changes are already happening, often caused through student initiatives. Furthermore, he emphasizes that equal conditions are highly important for successful partnerships:

“Research shows that the best teams are those where people feel respected, and are not afraid to express their opinions, uncertainties and failures.”

Tuija Veintie has done research on indigenous perspectives, sustainability education and epistemic pluralism and is involved in the Helsinki Inequality Initiative (INEQ). One important practice for her to enable diverse partnerships are creative means of knowledge making. She stresses how different epistemologies are expressed in diverse ways, including drawing, singing or dancing. Including these approaches helps to reduce power imbalances and address sensitive topics.

Another fundamental principle is the practice of active listening:

“We don’t need to agree or think similarly but you should at least try to actively listen to other perspectives. Only that way, we can create new types of knowledge together.”

Tapio Nykänen researches Northern politics, societies, and cultures from the perspective of the Indigenous Sámi. Overall, he stresses the importance of the recently published “Ethical Guidelines for Research Involving the Sámi People” that put respect, trust and safety in the center of every research project. But even if researchers want to follow these guidelines, it is not always possible to put them into practice.

One major problem, according to Tapio, is that public funding in Finland does not offer any instruments to pay communities for their collaboration. In his previous projects, Tapio was able to bypass this through private funding, but these opportunities are very limited and not sufficient to ensure responsible and sustainable partnerships on a large scale:

"How are we supposed to build fair partnerships when we can’t pay any salary to our research partners, especially since many projects take several years?”

In the following groupwork, participants got active themselves and brainstormed about ways how to implement the diverse insights from the panel into real-life situations. Main points included using bottom-up approaches and involving research collaborators during all phases of the project. Furthermore, participants highlighted the importance of communication to acknowledge people’s diverse backgrounds and the need to make leadership positions available to everyone equally.

UniPID engaged on discussions around sustainability and responsibility in the main UNIFI seminar program

In addition to our Annual Seminar, UniPID actively joined the general discussion in the main program at the UNIFI seminar, including parallel sessions and workshops. UniPID Board Vice Chair Prof. Elina Lehtomäki took part in the panel discussion titled “How can universities foster social responsibility through leadership?” on Monday, 4 November. As a panelist, Elina stressed the need to consider our own knowledge, the incompleteness of our knowledge, and how diverse partnerships challenge our limited knowledge. Domestic issues are important, but if we fail to understand the interconnectedness, we fail to understand the global connectedness of our domestic problems.

On Tuesday, 5 November, the participants of the UNIFI seminar joined parallel sessions that followed up on the progress of universities in implementing UNIFI’s Theses for Sustainability and Responsibility and mapped out required actions for the years to come. Contributors from the UniPID community gave lighting talks during the parallel sessions to ignite the discussion on joint actions. In session I on Sustainable and responsible research, UniPID Board member Ilkka Jormanainen, university lecturer in computing from the University of Eastern Finland sparked the discussion giving insights from his research collaboration and partnerships in Africa. University of Oulu’s university teacher and UniPID Virtual Studies teacher Marika Oikarinen shed light into experiencing dialogue and mutual empowerment in teaching through her course Global Education Development in session II on Education promoting sustainable development. Session IV: Societal impact and collaboration as drivers of change had input from two UniPID board members, Aalto Global Impact director Riina Subra and Osku Haapasaari, project specialist from the University of Turku, Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC). Osku focused on the concept of equitable partnerships in his talk, whereas Riina shared Aalto University’s experiences on impact through Global South partnerships.

The eventful week in Oulu concluded with UniPID participating in the Climate University’s project fair, where Marika Oikarinen, the teacher in charge of the UniPID course Global Education Development, presented both UniPID’s Virtual Studies Catalogue and her course to the Climate University network and stakeholders involved in climate education.

Thank you all who joined us both in Oulu and online. We hope you found this thought-provoking event as enriching and fruitful as we did. We are already looking forward to meeting you in future opportunities.

Photo credits: Annie Spratt, 2017 on UnSplash.