From 24 July until 31 July, I curated the summer session of one of the ten circles at the Nordic Summer University (NSU), namely Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-Human World. This is a synthesis of the week in Saulkrasti, Latvia, with an invitation at the end to join one or more of our 3 last symposiums in the coming year.
Smaller, on design
Back in spring, we received some wonderful submissions in response to our Call for Papers (drafts, practice experimentations, poems), though not many, which was also our intention.
Last year, in Finland, we perhaps had too many people offering wonderful contributions; this time we could give each one a whole session, or more, and I also had more time to facilitate some sessions myself, such as the introduction, with a good group discussion on the keyword eco+tones, and getting to know the land better, as we do place-informed research.
Practice Before Theory
I was even able to attend a session of another circle, where they departed from theory, sitting around a table, someone reading a draft aloud … and it was interesting to see the contrast with our own circle, where we actually start with practice, sit and move outside, and only organically arrive at existing theoretical frameworks. If there is a table, it is mostly a kitchen table or a table to create something.
Here is an overview of our sessions, with the practices between brackets:
- Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri × Wendy Wuyts: Soft landing, exploring the theme of eco+tones and introducing the circle (opening/relational practice)
- Evelyn Vogel-Leutung: Perception Playground (sensory/perceptual practice)
- Conor Gorman & Diana Vaznele: Evening Cultural Programme: Living Stories: The Songs, Rituals and Relationships Behind Latvian Myth and Human Collective’s Approach to Documentary (screening/documentary)
- Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri: Visit to the White Dune, with a sitting-spot invitation drawn from Evelyn’s Perception Playground (place-based fieldwork / solo contemplative practice)
- Sandy Heylen: The Seasons as Eco+Tones — Eight Key Moments for Care, Connection, and Natural Rhythms(seasonal/rhythm-based practice)
- Wendy Wuyts, assisted by all: Evening Cultural Programme: More than Human Fishbowl (dialogic/embodied practice)
- Magda Tabernacka: Spontaneous urban gardens — domesticating public space by inviting plants to share its landscape (combining urban ecology theory with crafting)
- Magda Tabernacka (and daughter): Watching the ice melt (contemplative/observational practice)
- Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri × Wendy Wuyts: Fermenting cucumbers and writing(with)cucumbers, before and after jarring (fermentation / more-than-human writing practice)
- Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri × Wendy Wuyts: Swamp/forest bathing and writing(with)swamp plants (embodied fieldwork / more-than-human writing practice)
- Collective Fabula: Book talk Relational Landscapes and experimentation with “making kin in a troubled landscape” (dialogic / relational practice)
- Wenlin Tan: An embodied invitation
- Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri × Wendy Wuyts: Closing the cauldron— what did we learn about eco-tones, the place, and our ecological self through the diverse practice experimentations? (embodied practice / closing reflective circle).
- And all what happens between: e.g. Listening with Saulkrasti: An Ecotone of Self (blogpost by Wenlin)
(Update: 10 August 2026: more links to new blogposts or academic papers going into details of one or more sessions might be added later.)
From Miro to the Land
Instead of digital collaboration tools such as the Miro board we used at the winter symposium, the summer symposium relied on embodied and place-based documentation methods, conducted predominantly in outdoor settings across the dune, the swamp, and the shoreline. We made several audio recordings of our group talks (with consent), which have since been transcribed using TurboScribe.ai. These transcripts may be developed into an academic paper on the summer session, or perhaps on the whole three-year journey of (un)learning and co-producing knowledge, including shared vocabularies such as ecomythology and ecotoning.
Ecotones has an ecological register, but we are aware that Astrida Neimanis (who propelled the concept of hydrofeminism) and Laura Denning have written papers that propose other ways of working with ecotones. During the week, we came up with different interpretations.
This is based on the group talks and own reflections during and after that week:
Our Pillar, Our Cauldron
During the summer session in Latvia, we claimed a pillar and table in the accommodation building, which became our meeting point, as we hadn’t been allocated a meeting room like the other circles. Our “pillar” grew daily as participants contributed found or crafted objects (hello, blueberries and cucumbers), books, academic papers, a small statue from the Eglė myth, and an evolving eco-mythological map. You might say the audio recordings and the pillar were our cauldron… or, in more academic terms, our material documentation.
Nested Within a Bigger Whole
Our circle’s programme was nested within the larger Nordic Summer University programme, which made the interactions between circles genuinely interesting. At the end of the week, our circle members compared experiences and agreed that the main building always felt like summer, buzzing, humming, all about productivity, but that we might also need other seasons within a day, and within a week. These could be found during our own sessions, but perhaps less so in the shared spaces.
Different Rhythms, Shared Rooms
I was staying in a single room, even outside the main accommodation (some coordinators had to move, as there wasn’t enough space), but I listened to circle members’ stories of sharing rooms with people living on entirely different rhythms and schedules. Apparently, the main dining room isn’t always the only place to eat. In other years, there have been smaller rooms, or tables set up outside … since 145 people, including children, can make for a lot of noise and business. But that, too, is part of our work and our world(s): sharing space, coping with diversity, and navigating diverse sounds and needs.
As someone who is neurodiverse, I know I had to pay extra for a single room to protect myself and have time/space for my self occasionally…. and unfortunately, there were fewer single rooms available this year than before, so I was only one of the few with this privilege. This raises a real tension: how do you make space for those who need it, while also keeping things affordable enough to allow for diversity in who can attend at all … especially now that NSU no longer has access to the funding it once did, back when Erasmus didn’t yet exist and NSU held a more unique position in the European landscape of learning practices.
A Microcosm of a Macrocosm
NSU feels like a microcosm within a bigger macrocosm. If we cannot find schedules and rhythms that accommodate diverse needs in a small space, over the course of a single week, how might we ever find schedules and compromises for something as vast as a country? And this brings us, inevitably, to democracy, one of the pillars, and fields of interest, of many people here at the Nordic Summer University,. Ecotones, I realised more and more over the week (and I was not the only one) is actually a fascinating lens through which to look at democracy and co-existence.
Four Registers of One Word
What became clear, session by session, was that “ecotone” refused to stay in one place.
It kept slipping between registers, and by the final circle, we were naming this slippage explicitly:
- There was the ecological register we began with: the edge as the place where biodiversity is at its richest, made vivid for us at the White Dune, where none of us could locate the precise point at which river became sea, or the birch-dominating zone between evergreen forests and the swamp.
- There was a somatic register, which emerged as the week went on: the body itself as an instrument for sensing thresholds, discussed alongside a certain scepticism towards wearable technologies that promise to sense on our behalf, outsourcing a capacity we already have.
- There was a social and organisational register, which became impossible to ignore once we started noticing ecotones not only in the dune grass but in a shared room, a dining hall, a whole organisation stretched between its overlapping circles, NSU as ecotone, quite literally.
- And finally, there was a mythic register, which arrived almost unbidden in our closing circle, through a story of a woman who crosses between land and sea on a bargain, and can only truly belong to both by returning, again and again, to each.
None of these registers cancelled the others out. These registers are not separate applications of one idea but co-produce each other in real time, e.g., someone’s remark about body’s nervous-system rhythms becomes a lens on institutional culture. The group did not just discuss ecotones : it enacted ecotoning as a collective epistemic practice, and in doing so generated a working, multi-scalar definition that moved fluidly between the ecological, the somatic, the social/organisational, and the mythic.
If anything, the learning effect of the week was precisely this: watching one word hold ecological, bodily, social, and mythic meaning all at once, without needing to be resolved into a single definition, which is, perhaps, exactly what living with tension. Instead of solving it away, looks like in practice.
Hence, we can see ecotoning as a transferable pedagogical method. It would be a possible step to dig what made the concept “travel” across registers, and what this suggests for designing transformative-learning spaces (epistemological humility, tension as generative rather than a problem to solve, seasonal/rhythmic ethics of care), yes, the big ambition of our learning circle.
On Compatibility, and Mediator Species
One of the more practical insights to emerge from especially the social and organizational register was a shift in how we spoke about compatibility itself. Rather than asking whether two people, or two ways of being, were simply compatible or not, the circle began treating compatibility as a spectrum, a question of degree, context, and season, rather than a binary verdict. This reframing opened space for a working concept we found ourselves returning to: the mediator species, those beings, or indeed those people, who sit at the overlap between two worlds, and whose presence helps translate, soften, or simply hold the space where two rhythms meet.
In our own circle, this wasn’t an abstract idea. It named something several of us recognised in ourselves: a facilitation role we already inhabit, often without ever putting a word to it. Being a facilitator is not a fixed identity or role. It is something closer to a season. It is a function you move into when the moment calls for it, and move out of again once it has passed.
The mediator species doesn’t stay mediating forever; it steps into that role for a while, and steps back out. It reminded several of us of the woman in the seal-skin story that Sandy, an eco psychologist and participant in our circle, told on our final day: how she, this selfie whose skin got stolen, too, moved between two worlds, belonging fully to neither all the time, but returning, again and again, to renew the bargain each of her worlds asked of her. Perhaps that is what mediating an ecotone actually looks like in practice: It is not a permanent post. It is a rhythm you keep, season after season.
What Should NSU Learn From This?
Earlier, I reached for democracy as the lens the wider political economy which NSU is embedded within. But the more I sit with the weak, the more I think the sharper lens might not be democracy at all. It might be summer. Yes, the summer in Nordic Summer University.
The political economies NSU is entangled with are, if anything, pushing further into full summer mode: always producing, always visible, always on, with less and less room for the other seasons a person, or an organisation, actually needs to stay alive.
NSU resists this, in its own imperfect way (if there is such a thing as perfect). It always has, in its refusal to be simply another conference, in its insistence on unfinished conversations, unlisted learnings and the attention for care, embodied by e.g. the Children’s Circle.
But resistance doesn’t mean immunity. At one point, I had to ask for a break during the Assembly myself, as a decision was nearly made without asking for consent again, one that would have shaped my coming year…. The reaction from some in the room was telling: I felt a pressure simply not to resist and serve the collective. It was also in the room, this unspoken pressure, the kind that can build quickly among sixty people caught in a moment of collective urgency. I felt nervous and a bit afraid to stand up against this collective urgency, but I did it because my individual body reacting (I started to sweat, talking about summer) was stronger and forced me to not give in to the pressure of the collective urgency . Yes, there was panic, and I talked with someone and gave my consent, but I still felt not happy how fast and urgent decisions were (almost) taken, without a second thought.
Looking back, I think the most NSU thing to have done, in that moment, would have been the opposite: to not rush a decision, especially one about governance. If there is a season that decision-making needs, it is rarely summer.
NSU is not outside the macrocosm it critiques. It is one of its ecotones. NSU is a zone where an older, slower, more seasonal way of learning together meets a wider world that has mostly forgotten how to do anything but summer. This can lead to situations where NSU becomes more a reflection of the political economy, the hustle culture, we want to criticize.. without even realizing it.
Perhaps what NSU has to learn from our circle’s week isn’t a lesson about coexistence out there, in the abstract shape of democracy … but a much closer question: what would it take for NSU itself to hold more than one season in this one week of togetherness?
As my fellow coordinator Vitalija remarked, it would be good to begin engaging with the place of next summer’s session well before we arrive there, perhaps sending seeds ahead, of food we might plant and later eat together when we return, or thinking now about water purification and storage solutions, as a way of giving something back to the local community and place we will come to depend on – for a week.
We are, after all, not just studying ecotones. We are one.
What’s next?
The cauldron doesn’t close for long. Our next gathering will be an online autumn symposium, in the weekend of 12–13 December, held in the same spirit as our winter eco+mythology symposium, this time exploring a new keyword for our shared vocabulary: eco+thanatology.
You can stay in your pyjamas. No travelling, no packing, no shuttle bus to catch, just a well-prepared Miro board, enough breaks, and a bit of photo-voice practice (though for that part, you may need to trade the pyjamas for something warmer, and step outside to photograph whatever the keyword stirs in you).
A Call for Papers, prayers, and practices will follow in the coming week. Yes, very soon.
Beyond that, two on-land symposia are already taking shape for 2027: one in Lithuania, between winter and spring, and one in Sweden, in summer, continuing the same rhythm of practice-before-theory, and word-by-word vocabulary-building, that has carried us from eco-nomy, to eco-mythology, to eco+tones, and now onward.
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