Discursive Programming

Session 3E – Art and Sustainable Development
Theme: Sharing and Shaping
Tuesday, 16 June 2026, 13.00-14.00
Studion, Folkets Hus

This panel introduces artists and art educators working with socially engaged and Land-Based practices embedded in communities to find new and rediscover old ways of sustainable transformation. Contemporary educational practice and research call for a transformative shift toward more humble and sustainable ways of living, recognition of planetary limits, and renewed meaningfulness rooted in relationships with the Land and communities. Indigenous Land-Based Education, along with environmental and place-based approaches, offers valuable insights for this shift. These perspectives emphasise knowledge and learning as inseparable from place and community, understood as interconnected and holistic. Engaging with Land-Based Education supports the decolonisation of education and the renewal of relationships between Indigenous peoples, other Northerners, their cultures, and the Land. Such approaches also hold global relevance for artists and for art and design education. This panel explores how we can recognize the Land as a vibrant and generous teacher in new genre Arctic art and art education.

Speakers
Maria Huhmarniemi, University of Lapland
Maria Huhmarniemi, DA, is Vice Dean and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Art and Design, University of Lapland. Her work focuses on art and research that advance cultural sustainability and support sustainability transformations in the Arctic. She develops Arctic art and art education, and has created socially and environmentally engaged art, pioneering arts-based methods to address societal challenges. Huhmarniemi serves as the UArctic Chair in Arctic Art and Design and leads the Arctic Sustainable Arts and Design network.

Panellists
Timo Jokela, University of Lapland
Timo Jokela, Professor Emeritus of Art Education at the University of Lapland in Fin land, a former Chair of Art, Design and Culture and lead of the thematic network on Arctic Sustainable Arts and Design (ASAD) at the University of the Arctic. His theoretical studies, art and art-based development projects focus on the relationship between northern cultures, art and nature. Jokela has been responsible for several international and regional development and research projects in art and art education. Jokela has presented his art in several exhibitions in Finland and abroad.

Mette Gårdvik, Nord University
Mette Gårdvik is a Professor of Arts Education at Nord University, Nesna, Norway. She holds both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in arts and handicraft education. Gårdvik is a member of the research group Place-based Learning and Education for Sustainable Development and represents Nord in the University of the Arctic’s thematic network Arctic Sustainable Arts and Design (ASAD). She has held both academic and administrative responsibility for international and interdisciplinary courses at the master’s and PhD levels, including Living in the Landscape, and Lessons of the Land: New Genre Arctic Art and Land-Based Learning, developed in close collaboration with institutions such as the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. Alongside her research activities, she teaches design, arts and crafts and didactics across all levels of teacher education.

Gunvor Guttorm, Sámi allaskuvla/Sámi University of Applied Sciences
Gunvor Guttorm is a Norwegian Sami art historian, artist and expert on duodji. She is a professor at Sámi Allaskuvla, and is an honorary doctor of the World Indigenous Nations University. For almost 40 years, Guttorm has promoted studies of the Sami and indigenous peoples around duodji through research and teaching. Guttorm’s research is interconnected with cultural expression in the Sámi and indigenous societies, especially duodji. The focus of her research deals with duodji in a contemporary setting, and indigenous people’s context. She has written extensively about how the traditional knowledge of Sámi art and craft is transformed into the modern lifestyle. In an Indigenous world, she has participated as invited speaker at Indigenous research congresses and participated in exhibitions in Sápmi and abroad.

Shannon Leddy, the University of British Columbia
Dr. Shannon Leddy is a member of the Métis Nation of British Columbia and an associate professor of art education at the University of British Columbia, whose practice focuses on using transformative pedagogies in decolonizing and Indigenizing teacher education. Before arriving at UBC, Shannon taught high school Art, Social Studies, and English. She is the Co-Chair of the Institute for Environmental Learning, along with Dr. David Zandvliet, and her book, Teaching where you are: Weaving slow and Indigenous pedagogies, co-written with Dr. Lorrie Miller, is now available from the University of Toronto Press.

Tarsh Bates, Umeå University
Bates is the UmArts Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Design and Molecular Biology at Umeå Institute of Design and the Department of Molecular Biology. In their postdoctoral research, they have been exploring the roles of odorants generated by microbes through their metabolic processes within ecologies, how these can be understood as interspecies communications and how they are affected by environmental and climate changes.