In this presentation, Rasmussen will offer some reflections, practices, and meditations to counter the ideology of scarcity that permeates neo-liberalism and education. An introduction to the Buddhist meditations of the “four immeasurables” – loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity – will be offered, with special attention to the third, sympathetic joy (‘mudita’ in Pali) and the social ethic of positive gossip (‘uniqsiuq’ in Inuktitut).

In the presentation, we will introduce our work in the University of Lapland in the International Master´s program Arctic Art and Design. The program includes socially-engaged art practices and students´ projects at the intersection of art and design in the Northern environment. The concept of applied visual arts is used to describe the place- and community-specific projects in which the artistic methods are for a variety of purposes. In this presentation, we ask how applied visual arts can serve communities and environment. We show examples of students’ projects. Huhmarniemi also presents her own artistic work that has a dimension of environmental activism. She has done art-based research on berry picking conflicts in Lapland.  Currently, she is working with the art project as an intervention to the conflict of the tourism industry and a planned mining site in Kolari, Lapland. The questions of cultural sustainability are intertwined to these cases.  

The history of Western philosophy is marked by the controversial relationship between conceptual thought and sensory perception – between how things supposedly are, and how things appear to be. Philosophical aesthetics, in turn, has been in the epicenter of this crisis, striving to find the fundamental principles underlying the connection between the quality and truthfulness of experience. On the basis of such foundationalist accounts, also normative assertions regarding particular experience follow: one has to pay attention to the right aspects of reality and take the right background information into account if one is to achieve appropriate and justified “aesthetic experience”.

Concerning various environments, and especially the urban realm, such line of thought has led to a hegemony of expertise-based evaluation of aesthetic quality. Thinking of the politics of urbanism, this has meant an implicit yet compelling demand for a consensus about the environmental aesthetic issues – a consensus that is “informed” by the expertise, and thus reflects the worldview of the aesthetic elite. From a contemporary perspective, such conception is, in short, absurd. Cities are cultural melting pots, and every urbanite has a right to aesthetically satisfactory habitat. Thus urban aesthetics should be primarily aesthetics of diversity – not aesthetics of consensual uniformity.

Green roofs and walls have become common features in illustrations of modern architectural and urban design proposals but their implementation remains limited by perceptions of high costs and questions over their utility. Years of studies by several research groups around the world have found compelling evidence to support green roof implementation to our cities.

Nowadays greening of our cities is considered efficient for different purposes – climate change adaptation, stormwater management, aesthetic, recreational and noise mitigation just to mention a few.

In order to be efficient greening needs to be done at a large scale. Therefore a range of solutions is needed to fit into different kinds of buildings so that they can provide a variety of ecosystem services. To tackle the high costs of green infrastructure lightweight solutions are needed alongside with heavier construction.

Mosses are a promising aspect for green roofs. However, we lack the basic knowledge concerning their use. Questions include what species would be best suited for different roof types and what kind of substrates best support the growth of mosses. Our research group has shed light on this topic and we now suggest that mosses should be a more visible part of our everyday city experience.

When the infamous artist Joseph Beuys declared that “every human being is an artist” he was not defining art. He was defining humanity. Calling himself a sculptor, Beuys applied shamanism, mysticism, and alchemy into his oeuvre, trying to demonstrate the existence of spiritual realm within everything. He claimed that all human action, even thinking, is sculpture, because the core of sculpture is creating and shaping of forms – and human actions always form something. By calling everyone an artist and everything sculpture, Beuys wanted to provoke people to realize their creative potential that lies hidden under the superficial lifestyle of success and profit-making. For him, art/creativity was the way to connect with the spiritual realm, which would lead to an enlarged understanding of the world. Essentially, this understanding means abandoning calculative, technological way of regarding everything as a mere resource. It is one way of letting the world reveal itself to us as it is, which in turn will allow us to see the complex relationships between all the things in the world. This is what Bateson calls systemic wisdom, and it is a vital lesson to learn for humankind in order to survive the consequences of its own actions.

Ecological transition theories and experiments are often staged in the consumerist techno-economical setting. Green movements in arts and society have blamed to just eco-decorate modern industrial grand narrative.

But in modernism, art was seen as a creator of new humanities or even a new world(views). Suprematists in early 20^th century Russia intended to replace the organic nature with man-made suprematist one. When observing satellite images, one can’t avoid a notion, that hundred years later the human land use change covering more than 50% of planet’s surface not only follows rational self-interests but also suprematist aesthetic fantasies.

Kasimir Malevich’s famous painting Black Square on a white surface was first shown in a stage set of futurist opera Victory Over the Sun (1913). The Black Square manifested the transition from sun-powered tsarist autocracy to fossil energy driven proletarian leadership.

Opera and painting pictured the world which had been a technological and societal reality well over 50 years in industrialized societies. Avant-gardist and societal revolution took place when theories and practices, stage and world outside the concert hall suddenly overlapped.

Should we prepare for a similar kind of cultural-societal state shift now, when post-fossil transition or collapse has been seen inevitable for decades?

In this address, I explore eros as a generative connective force that plays on us in our embodied relationship to the more than human community, inviting us toward its protection and care. Moreover, I will argue that such love is found in the most unlikely places, in small rural towns yes, but also on the streets of our most devastated urban centers. Drawing on the concept of the commons, I look to current, on the groundwork being done in the city of Detroit, where I found small groups of people passionately engaged in revitalizing their neighborhoods with their hands in the dirt, and paint brushes on canvas. Linking this work and the love I experienced with them to my own homeplace in Northern NY, I argue that our salvation (to borrow from bell hooks) is necessarily dependent upon our embodied, passionate and ethical relationship to a larger living community. Eros plays in this complex, differentiating system of life that we depend upon for survival, and so does education.

In this presentation will be pondered what kind of imagination is needed for an education that is more than a theory of learning in the product world. The concepts of moral imagination and prognostic hermeneutics are presented and discussed.

We know how to celebrate Christmas and Easter in western/Lutheran manner and we consider them as an essential part of Finnish culture. The origins of many Finnish traditional celebrations are several annual feasts that have gradually diminished within time and remembrance or they have become unfamiliar for modern people. Such feasts are for instance Ukko’s vakkas in May, Kekri in late autumn after crop harvest or Karhunpeijaiset, the celebration of bear, which was held after a successful bear hunt. All of these examples are feasts, which Finnish people used to celebrate together in their home village. The celebration included sharing food, drink and spending time with fellow villagers. All of these feats offer interesting aspects of Finnish mythology and the respectful stance for nature, i.e. forests, farms, and lakes. In this presentation, we take a glance at these old celebrations and their possibilities of utilization for today and as a part of cultural heritage education.

Collage approach is an art-based methodology, which engages with visual world politics as it materializes through depictions of current international events, for example on the internet. It is a conceptual and aesthetic mode of thinking and doing research and offers a way of working with visual material creatively and imaginatively. Furthermore, collaging is a way of engaging with today’s increasingly fragmented ways of knowing about global politics in a creative and empathetic ways. Collage methodology functions as a way to counter and disrupt the representational demands of conventional academic writing, in other words, it aims to challenge what we think counts as Research. It can be used both individually and collectively in research and in teaching. This intervention explores collaging as an emancipatory and political pedagogic tool and describes how it can be used.

This presentation discusses the tenets of EcoJustice Education in the context of a creative literary analysis of two critical novels, Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter and Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker. Grounded in Arts-based and Arts-informed research, this work depicts an imagined letter correspondence between the two protagonists. The journey of love, grief, resilience, and membership that Gertie Nevels and Hannah Coulter embark on through these letters illustrates the deep cultural examination and healing traditions that EcoJustice scholars study. Through the reflections and conversations that ensue, these characters embark on a pedagogical journey which seeks meaning in a changing society, challenges the assumptions of a culture of modernity, and seeks to rediscover the beauty of belonging.

In this presentation, the researcher will read poetry created from the interviews of three adult women with intellectual and learning disabilities. The field of disability studies has the same problem than any other academic research: the results reach only the scholars of the specific field and perhaps a few of the professionals working in the same field. The arts-based research has, in contrast, the ability to engage with the wider audience. Especially in social and educational studies, the arts-based methods have proved to be powerful in an attempt to bring forward the voices of marginals. Similarly, the arts-based disability studies also have the great potential to respond to the call that professor Simo Vehmas has made: to listen and bring to the fore the voices of people with disabilities and also to commit in the promotion of the equal empowerment and engagement of people with disabilities in our society. The researcher has crafted the poetry (originally in Finnish) from the interviews in a way that the original voices of the women can still be heard but the content and the form of the poems highlight the core of the women’s experiences. The poetry aims to offer an evocative experience to the audience and that way engage people with the better understanding of, and perhaps also action towards, more just future.

Against the backdrop of the dominant political economic rationale of neoliberalism that emphasizes all-around productivity, cost-effectiveness, freedom of choice and individual responsibility, the fat body is constructed as an epitome of a body that is unproductive, unprofitable, immoral and irresponsible. Fat people are societally positioned as “out of control”, excessive and an economic burden to society. My aim is to discuss how for instance, neoliberalization of the public and private sphere, e.g., marketization and economization of health and health care, extensive responsibilization of the individual over their bodies’ appearance, capabilities and performance as well as promotion of the entrepreneurial approach towards the self, participate in the construction of the “neoliberal body” and at the same time forcibly reject fat bodies (among many other groups of people who reside in marginalized bodies), thus making them especially vulnerable to neoliberal governing, moral condemnation and abuse.

A performative autoethnography, this piece reflects on madness, anthropocentrism, and othering that leads to the slicing of roots, of fleece, of veins, often by our own doing.

Emotions impact morality. Yet, understanding concerning their relevance is still limited, and particularly their effect on environmental ethics is under-studied. The paper explores the significance of empathy and elevation as two emotion-clusters, which can serve a productive role in recognizing the inherent value in environmental entities. First, two varieties of empathy – projective and reflective empathy – are juxtaposed, and it will be argued that whereas the former may lead to noting value only in beings that are socially depicted as “similar” to oneself, the latter avoids this bias by focusing critical attention on those cultural beliefs, which may distort empathic processes. Second, elevation will be discussed as an emotion brought forward by classics such as Thoreau and “The young romantics” in their descriptions of wilderness. Recent studies on elevation’s role in environmental attitudes will be mapped out, and it will be argued that reflective empathy can serve as one foundation of “environmental elevation”.

Human relationships with animals reflect the beliefs, values, ethics, and health of societies. Animal roles in human lives vary from companionship, admiration, curiosity, dependence, ignorance, exploitation, and abuse. Paradigm shifts in art, education, and research reflect broader ontological and epistemological directions of societies. From an ethical perspective, it is important to ponder the broad span from eating to loving animals and/or to using animals as artistic material. As Wolfe has suggested, animal studies, and work against speciesm, add to and partially align with the social movement of disability studies, contemporary civil rights activism, feminism, and environmentalism focused on post-anthropocentrism, and activism for sexual and gender diversity. In this presentation, we explore how art education might rethink the human-animal relationship and how this would contribute to the move towards more humane and democratic education and society. While animal studies perspective is an important addition to social movements, we argue that the issues should be considered from a non-human perspective. Hence, there is a difference between animal studies and other social movements, due to the historical divide between human and animal.

Even though environmental education has focused on environmental problems in recent years, we still have not been able to create big enough change in people’s opinions and actions. My aim is to study the meaning of experience in environmental education. The study examines the importance of experience through semi-structured expert interviews with environmental educators from Ohio. I am interested in how experience is manifested in environmental education and how environmental educators define the importance of experience as a part of their pedagogy. I am focusing on the concept of experience following the theory of John Dewey.

At this point, my study shows that environmental educators are concerned about our disconnection to the natural environment. To all of my informants, the most important task of the environmental education is to create or re-build that connection. Just being out in nature and focusing on the experience-based knowledge works for all age-groups in order to build a stronger connection between people and their natural environment. Therefore, the main task of environmental educators is to create time and place for multi-sensory experiences to help people form a stronger connection to nature.

The story of life is often constructed through individuals’ persuasion of self-interest and competition in-between. This, while not being completely false, leaves little space for our empathic nature. As evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis has proven through Endosymbiotic Theory, all complicated life forms have evolved through co-operation. Mutualism also enriches life whereas too much competition can be detrimental to diversity. Thus the most important question in life is not “How to pursue my self-interest?” but “How to live with others?” Fortunately, evolution has produced mechanisms to reply to the latter, our ability for empathy is one of them.

According to prevailing credo competition, greed, and selfishness are good. Supposedly, human greed and selfishness that work in competition stimulate the economy and provide employment and material welfare for all. Competition is defined as social action in which free people try to outdo each other for gaining more scarce resources than others. Because human wants and needs, which are not ontologically separated, are seen insatiable and human beings are unable to share, there is inevitable competition. Competition is thought to be the universal truth about human beings and societies. But what if this belief system in its core assumptions false? This is the main claim of this paper. By analyzing the most important cultural assumptions of competition I will show competition is anything but the universal truth about humanity, society, and nature. Competitive thought ignores, for example, the human capability for empathy, sharing, and collaboration. Competitive thinking ignores that collaboration can be learned by changing the socialization environment. It ignores also learning modest needs and wants that are in harmony with the life-supporting systems of this earth. Ultimately, competitive selfishness, greed, and sense of entitlement are destructive for human beings and other living beings as well.

The current state of the environment has been achieved by acting linearly. Simultaneously, we know that transition towards sustainable society cannot be made trusting only the market economy and economic growth. Recent research has shown that the lofty words of sustainable strategies do not appear in operational activities. We have a new kind of cooperation as we combine two disciplines, engineering science, and visual arts, for environmental research. This research combination makes the existing information visible in a new way, and this changes attitudes and ways to act by means other than traditional, linear rationality.

We aim at increasing material efficiency, saving natural resources and extending product lifecycles via product design and material development. We employ the cyclic, artistic means for creative solutions, which are tested and put into practice in the same action. We have tested our research combination in the first case study with the product of construction industry. The case was carried out in three workshops, in which the artistic means raised the awareness of sustainabilities. In addition, the used methods of artistic research and environmental education will be presented in detail in this paper.

As an educator, one of my primary concerns lies with the cultivation of thoughtful language use in my students. In this paper, I argue that teacher educators must systematically address language issues in their courses as part of teaching about the ethical dimension of teaching. Teachers who are aware that language influences our thinking, beliefs, and behavior and who understand that discourses shape our worldviews have the potential to become responsible language users. They can then inspire responsible language use in their own students. To that end, I examine how the particular way EcoJustice scholars (Bowers, 2001; Bowers & Martusewicz, 2009; Martusewicz, 2013; Martusewicz, Edmundson, & Lupinacci, 2015; Martusewicz, 2016) conceive of language, offers teacher educators the opportunity to orient their students toward responsible language practice as it relates to intersecting environmental and social contexts. I also tap into Pennycook’s (2010) work on “language as a local practice” and other scholarship in critical applied linguistics, critical discourse studies, and ethics to provide examples of how teacher educators can approach language and identity as arising out of and constantly being renewed through relationships and material and social practices.

Recent environmental catastrophes are making it painfully evident that our way of living has unforeseen repercussions. Consider for example the reality of global warming: what has been a morally neutral and cyclical stage of ‘nature’ has taken on a morally active and capricious agency that confounds our inherited ethical categories and exceeds our ethical aptitudes. Our particularly ‘modern’ way of differentiating human and non-human and culture and nature have been thrown into disarray. In light of this confusion, Timothy Morton (2016) theorizes a modality that is primed for our reality called ‘dark ecology’: a form of ecological awareness that is dark-depressing, dark-uncanny and strangely dark-sweet.

Foregrounding global warming as a case example, I use Timothy Morton’s (2013) concept of hyperobject to tease out the multiple implications involved in thinking about environmental education research after ‘nature’; that is to say without the symbolic support of ‘nature’ that has heretofore aided in compartmentalizing ecological phenomena and awareness into cultural and natural, local and global and human and non-human categories. The import of Morton’s ‘dark ecology’ lies in acknowledging the uncanny, traumatic nature of thinking about environmental education research in a world of hyperobjects.

Arts For Parks suggests an arts-based perspective in parks’ experiential and educational methods may help mend the relationship between humans and their ecologies where traditional methods fall short. There is a long history of park planning and programming attempts to facilitate place-making. However, given the critical need for environmental understanding and action in a contemporary society moving further from its ecology, artistic ways of being are needed to contribute where traditional methods are falling short.

Arts for Parks is an effort to utilize art as a primary method in educational and experiential design not simply created space for arts within existing programming. Arts for Parks also brings the arts-based perspectives to popular park and recreation theories such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory and the work of Richard Louv on the value of unstructured play experiences in nature.

Arts For Parks is the manifestation of inspiration from the Art-Eco Project. Applied within the Stark County (Ohio) Park District, this initiative seeks to complement and possibly complete the needs of existing programming and planning efforts through the creation of an artists’ collaborative, the creation of new arts-based programs and park plans and the critique and redevelopment of existing EE and recreation programs.