An inventory of current research initiatives from collaborators of the Futures, Crossovers & Returns research symposium.
MID- SWEDEN UNIVERSITY
These projects are related to the work of Katarina Giritli-Nygren, a Professor in Sociology and Sara Nyhlen an Associate Professor in Sociology at Mid-Sweden University.
The LOKA project
Together we work within the LOKA project, which is a research program focusing on people deemed as “distant”from the labour market. Here we work both with the institutional framework as well as together with participants in the local activation programmes. In relation to this we have explored some participatory methodologies using collages and visionary workshops. During spring of 2026 Sara is conducting poetry workshops with participants and politicians. We are very keen on learning more about different methodologies connected to participation and arts. In relation to this Sara is also starting a new project focusing on steering logics within the state, where the empirical field will (most probably be) social work. Here I want to focus on what happens in the everyday work of professionals when steering logics of Trust Based Governance collides with models for evidence-based practices.
Labour Market Inclusion after Criminal Justice: An Intersectional Perspective
This research area examines labour market inclusion for individuals with criminal justice backgrounds through qualitative interviews with people with prison experience engaged in municipal labour market units. The research analyses how labour market measures, institutional encounters, and support structures are experienced and navigated in everyday practice, focusing on how stigma, organisational fragmentation, and local welfare arrangements shape pathways to employment. An intersectional analytical approach highlights how gender, class, ethnicity, and criminal justice history interact in these processes, producing unequal expectations of employability
Christianity, Moral Authority, and Gender in Secular Societies
This research area examines how Christianity is rearticulated as a cultural and moral resource in highly secularized societies, with a particular focus on Sweden and the Nordic context. Rather than approaching religion as belief or institutional authority, the research analyzes how Christian references circulate in public discourse as a symbolic grammar through which moral authority, national identity, and belonging are negotiated. A central analytical focus is how gender operates within these articulations: instrumentally, through appeals to equality and protection as markers of civilizational superiority, and morally, through gendered claims to ethical depth, authority, and interpretive legitimacy. Drawing on discourse theory, the work explores postsecular configurations in which secular and religious languages intertwine, showing how Christianity remains hegemonically central as a flexible moral infrastructure rather than as lived faith.
Slow Resilience, Temporality, and Everyday Endurance
This research area explores resilience as a temporally uneven social practice rather than a technical capacity for recovery or adaptation. Drawing on feminist and intersectional risk theory, the research examines how resilience is lived under conditions of chronic uncertainty, where crisis is experienced as an ongoing
condition rather than an episodic event. A central focus is on slow temporalities of resilience such as care, cultivation, and maintenance through which endurance is sustained in everyday life, often along gendered and classed lines. By foregrounding time as an analytical lens, the research reconceptualizes resilience as a mode of living with uncertainty, revealing how responsibility for adaptation and persistence is unevenly distributed and largely rendered invisible in dominant policy and governance framework.
Back to nature movements
Green Waves in three waves explores the contemporary green wave in Sweden by placing it in relation to two earlier periods of back-to-nature movements: the first in the early twentieth century and the second during the 1960s and 1970s. Using a historical-sociological perspective, the project analyses how these waves have been shaped by their specific social, political, and ideological contexts, and how they have influenced ideas about nature, rurality, and sustainable ways of living. The project starts from the premise that green waves are not merely about individual lifestyle choices or a longing for a simpler life. Rather, they are deeply embedded in broader societal processes such as industrialisation, urbanisation, environmental crises, and state governance. The study examines how ideas of self-sufficiency, closeness to nature, and alternative forms of living have re-emerged across different historical moments, while also highlighting the blind spots that have accompanied these ideals particularly in relation to gender, class, and settler-colonial power relations. By comparing three waves over time, the project identifies both continuities and ruptures in how nature and the countryside have been understood and politicised. The analysis sheds light on how early green movements sometimes intersected with nationalist and colonial projects, how the environmental movements of the 1970s both challenged and reproduced social inequalities, and how today’s green wave is shaped by digitalisation, crisis preparedness, and climate anxiety. Empirically, the project combines archival research, policy analysis, interviews, and analyses of media and cultural expressions. Through this broad material contributes new knowledge on how historical experiences can inform and critically challenge contemporary transition movements. Ultimately, the project aims to deepen understanding of how sustainable societal transformations can become more long-term, inclusive, and socially grounded.
International Networks
We have been a part of initiating an international network of and for gender researchers, the network started in 2025 and we have had the first meeting in Vienna in January. The name of the network is ENERGI (European Network for Empowerment and Resilience of Gender Studies Initiatives), focusing on the increasing repressive situation for critical research and the academia at large. We are at the moment producing our first Zine with among other things a manifest.
NSCAD UNIVERSITY
These projects are led by Dr. April Mandrona (NSCAD), a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Art Education, Belonging, and Social Change, and the Co-director of the Institute for Art, Community, and Transdisciplinary Studies (InACTS), and fellow Co-director Shakara Russell, a Lecturer in the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University. Storying Transnational Knowledges co-Investigating teams are led by Dr. Claudia Mitchell (McGill University); Prof. Ruth Wallace and Devaki Monani (Charles Darwin University); and Prof. Sue Nichols and Dr. Jill Colton (Adelaide University
Storying Transnational Knowledges—Connection through Narrative
This project provides tools and resources that help young newcomers based in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Montreal, Quebec; Darwin, Northern Territory; and Adelaide, South Australia to resist the politicization and
co-option of their narratives by telling their own stories. Newcomer young people are often at risk of poverty, violence, and social exclusion, and their precarious situations are frequently stereotyped in popular media and academia. This project offers collaborative workshops and access to creative tools to children and youth that help them expand their storytelling methods, supporting them to speak back to these problematic portrayals, asserting their own identities and narratives. Young people develop their own storytelling style and process on topics important to them, while connecting with adult knowledge-keepers, and with creative and community organizations that aim to support their personal and professional growth.
Lab for Us Digital Library
This project aims to facilitate community access to university resources, including technology and creative tools, which are often prohibitively expensive or institutionally restricted. The work is a nexus between technology, pedagogy, and community connections, positioning access itself as a form of inclusive social innovation that expands who can participate in creative and technological practice. This collaboration aims to broaden access to creative and technological resources by embedding inclusivity and care values into its technical infrastructure and user experience. Questions of tagging and annotation are central to the design, as well as how the use of the items and associated user knowledge can expand and enrich the evolving life of the resource. These practices create opportunities for users to shape how resources are described, interpreted, and made visible, supporting more equitable representation within the system. Central to the project is an interrogation of the politics of knowledge, including the power dynamics between players knowledge seekers, sharers, and keepers and assumptions of neutrality and objectivity embedded within the technological systems and tools themselves.
Libraries as Art Education, Belonging, and Social Change
Newcomer young people and practitioners (librarians, teachers, immigration service providers) from across Nova Scotia will explore the role of art and narrative creation in mediating the development of belonging in libraries. The project uses arts-based and community-driven approaches to engage participants in reflective, participatory data analysis and knowledge generation, and institutional critique. The goal is to articulate critical, creative approaches to social inclusion and counter the systems of racism, xenophobia, and exclusion that threaten the mental health and well-being of young newcomers to Canada.
Reframing Textile Innovation Through Care, Responsibility, Repair, and Futures of Material Stewardship
Textile innovation is often framed as technological novelty and sustainability as efficiency. Yet in everyday textile worlds laundering, mending, re-use, and craft durability is produced through care: attentiveness to materials, responsibility across lifecycles, and relationships among makers, users, and waste streams. This research proposes care ethics as a lens to connect historical textile production and reproduction (from pre- and early-modern domestic economies of repair) to contemporary regimes of disposability (fast fashion, synthetic blends, outsourced recycling) and argues that innovation is not only technological novelty but also the redesign of practices, relationships, and systems of material stewardship.
MCGILL UNIVERSITY
These projects are related to the work of Claudia Mitchell, Distinguished James McGill Professor & Director of the Participatory Cultures Lab at McGill University, together with McGill-based collaborators such as Monica Shank Lauwo, Rachel Kronick and Sewar Elejta
TRANSFORM: Engaging with Youth for Social Change
Gender inequalities and discrimination persist glaringly around the globe with gender-based violence standing out as one of the most widespread human rights violations. The United Nations has identified transforming harmful gender norms as a critical goal among its 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. And as the world’s largest youth population ever, young people are key players in local and transnational work to address gender equality.
This need for urgent action is driving a vital multiyear project at McGill University, TRANSFORM: Engaging with Young People for Social Change. TRANSFORM brings together 40 researchers, 16 universities, and 10 partner organizations including NGOs, policy actors, and publishers with hundreds of youth from around the world to study how young people are pivotal agents of change in gender equity, specifically through visual arts-based methodologies. At the core of TRANSFORM lies the concept of gender transformation a radical approach aimed at dismantling unequal gender dynamics to mobilize social change. Claudia is leading this SSHRC Partnership Grant, and April is a co-investigator and co-led of the Image and Impact node. Although gender transformation serves as a guiding framework for feminist practices in global engagements, the concept is understudied, particularly in real-world implementation contexts. Transform is supporting youth-led interventions to study how young people experience, envision, and enact gender transformation at field sites in Africa (Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa) Tanzania, and Latin America (Argentina, Mexico), and Indigenous youth in Canada. Transform includes various subprojects: Radical Methods Lab – youth-led approaches to supporting early career researchers in PVM Youth Studying Change – young people leading feminist approaches to studying change How does gender travel? A Study of travelling exhibitions? How do we understand the reach of gender transformative methods in a partnership network?
Girls
Authoring Alternative Futures (Monica Shank Lauwo)
Collaborating with 10-12-year-old Tanzanian girls as authors, artists, and change-makers, this project employs uraghibishi, a Tanzanian form of participatory action research, to support girls to unpack challenges in their communities and to author alternative futures. Through drawing, photovoice, and multilingual digital bookmaking, girls rewrite narratives of girlhoods, articulate their dreams, analyze challenges, develop strategies of action, and construct alternative futures
Photo Re-enactments and the Politics of Performing
This work cuts across two projects, one a SSHRC funded study called Rehearsals for Change, exploring how photo enactments and re-enactments can inform a workshop approach to reflexive engagement in professional learning settings, and the other an early stage project “Family Images and Questions about Consent: Re-visioning Family History through Research-Creation” which takes as its foundation a series of questions about the ethics of consent, in relation to delving into family histories through photographs irrespective of their format: whether the photographs are found in treasured leather-bound photo albums, casually stowed away in cardboard boxes, or, as is increasingly the case, digital‘albums’stored in cellphones or in a (AI-assisted) ‘cloud’. The core idea of this project is an examination of the politics of consent, and what it means to create and recreate speculative narratives and family mythologies through and with photography. The Research-Creation of this will involve the co-curation of three sets of family photographs and historical documents dating back to the early 1900s, in relation to a settler-informed Yorkshire-based family history. The formats currently considered will include a photography installation and video installation featuring both
archival and re-enacted material from my family albums and histories. This work will combine several artistic practices: video installation Citron, 1998); co-production soundscape/podcast, as well as a photoinstallation blurring family and historical images and archives (with Lignou-Tsamantani), and which will include photo re-enactments from family albums (Modrak, 2011; Pauli, 2000; Sandbye, 2014; Spence, 1986).
Arts-Based Youth Engagement in Inuit Contexts
Arts-based youth engagement in Rankin Inlet (Kangiqliniq, ᑲᖏᕿᓂᖅ), was developed through several previous focusing on the everyday experiences of Inuit young people and the role of creative practice in addressing gender inequality, wellbeing, and belonging. Working through long-standing partnerships with local coordinators, Elders, and women knowledge-holders, the Girls Expressing Themselves Through Art (GET Art) group (est. 2018) has used traditional and contemporary visual methodologies including sewing, collage, zine-making, music videos, and cellphilms to explore issues such as gender-based violence, bullying, and food insecurity. Cultural grounding is central: Elders share practices such as katajjaq (throat singing) and kakiniit (traditional tattoos), supporting intergenerational knowledge transfer and celebration of Inuit identity. Peer mentorship has become a defining feature, with older girls emerging as facilitators and co-leaders. In 2022, the girls’ identified a parallel need for boys to explore masculinity, mental health and social pressures led to the creation of Boys Expressing Themselves Through Art (BET Art) through the Pathways2Equity initiative. Working with local uncles and visiting facilitators, the boys produced original rap lyrics, recordings, and music videos that show increasing confidence, emotional openness, and cultural pride through the evolution of their music. Following this fieldwork and knowledge mobilization which ended in 2025, the PCL is interested in exploring new possibilities for funding (eg Arctic U, WAGE), particularly in relation to work with boys and young men.
Soundscaping Women’s
Futures
in Music (Augusta Valevicius)
Futures thinking is a relational, creative, and contemplative practice that invites us to imagine plural possibilities for the future by examining the stories and worldviews we collectively shape in the present and how we orient ourselves toward those futures. My project with young women musicians participates in this futures-thinking process by exploring what makes a musical life sustainable over time. Through sound-based co-creation, participants will explore their experiences, social dynamics, and their feelings about their musical futures through a lens of affect and belonging. Sound serves as a medium for imagining futures that support both long-term artistic career sustainability and emotional wellbeing, revealing possibilities for more supportive creative environments for women.
Arts-Based Psychosocial Support with Asylum-Seeking Palestinian Children (Rachel Kronick and Sewar Elejta) [SEE ALSO Storying Transnational Knowledges Connection through Narrative]
This initiative at the CPFQ Refugee Centre engages approximately 40 asylum-seeking Palestinian children and their families through flexible, open-ended creative activities. Designed to be responsive to the children’s own interests, the program employs drawing, storytelling, and other visual arts practices to foster cultural sensitivity, emotional expression, and psychosocial wellbeing. Art functions here as both a communicative and relational tool supporting children in making sense of displacement, strengthening family bonds, and building community among newly arrived families navigating an unfamiliar urban and institutional environment. The emphasis on narrative and creativity echoes broader commitments in global health and wellbeing research to recognise lived experience as a meaningful form of knowledge. The
approach integrates trauma-informed practice with participatory arts methodologies to create a supportive, culturally grounded space for self-expression, social integration, and community connection.