Notes from an Arctic retreat

Last week, just as the grant submission emotions were finally settling down, I got to experience a bit of tourist Lapland. The project REBOUND, focusing on just green transition in the Finnish North, had a two-day workshop and retreat in a holiday village right at the Arctic Circle.

REBOUND is a six-year project (2023–2029) funded by the Finnish Strategic Research Council and led by the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi. It aims to understand how to make green transition in Finland also just, meaning that it takes into account the perspectives of diverse Finnish residents. I am affiliated with Work Package 5 focusing on marginalized actors in energy transition: Indigenous residents, migrants, and more-than-human beings. All the other researchers in my WP are in the field of law, so it’s always exciting to see how we may approach the same topic from different perspectives and starting points.

Our workshop tasks focused on impact: how to select the target audience for our key messages, how to formulate those messages, and how to plan their outreach and timeline. At the end, we even created a paper timeline running up to 2029, with multiple post-it notes marking different impact channels and target audiences. This exercise got me reflect deeper about my own project strategy: how could I plan my impact in even more precise terms? It’s always easy to say that a project will target policymakers or media, but the actual planning of dissemination operates on a completely different level.

Behind the workshop room, the actual tourist experience began: taking photos of reindeer, visiting the lake (not frozen yet), and of course going to sauna. After that, we ran through fresh snow toward an outdoor hot jacuzzi, still feeling the warmth of the sauna while snowflakes landed on our hair.

As my colleague said, maybe that’s why we work in the Arctic.