A New Collaboration for the New Year

2026 began with good funding news: our research-art initiative “Tar, Power, Cloud: Strengthening Resilience through Art & Citizen Science” has recently received support from the Frontiers of Arctic and Global Resilience (FRONT) profiling research programme at the University of Oulu.

In this project, we aim to bridge ethnographic research, artistic practice, and citizen science to explore how industrial and technological development shapes human–landscape relations in the town of Muhos, just outside Oulu. I have long been interested in exploring the potential of research-art collaboration around questions of resource extraction in the Arctic. So, this feels like such an important opportunity – and hopefully (not too late for the New Year resolutions, right?), this is just the beginning.

I started thinking about this project when reading that citizen science initiatives are still less represented in social sciences and humanities (SSH), partially because it is often difficult to communicate the value of SSH research outside academia. I began to wonder whether art could serve as a bridge between academic research and wider audiences, translating research questions and premises into visual and sensory forms that can carry deep emotional meaning.

The aim is, though, not to approach art merely as a tool for dissemination. Rather, my idea is to think through the data collaboratively, drawing inspiration from the landscape itself and from the industrial legacies embedded within it.

We are still discussing the project specificities, so I will reflect on the initiative in more detail once it formally begins in spring 2026. For now, I am simply glad and hopeful that my ongoing exploration of transdisciplinary research will continue into the coming year.