Welcome!

This is the place where you can read about the projects and people that Laura Hellsten has been a visionary leader of.

Previously, Hellsten created arts and science collaborations at Åbo Akademi University under the project Avtryck i det okända – Forcing the Impossible. You can still find those collaborations and that work here.

In the summer of 2022, the Nordic Summer University welcomed a study circle under the name The Praxis of Social Imaginaries. Cosmologies, Othering and Liminality co-led by Lindsey Drury and Laura Hellsten. The work of the study circle was closely tied to the post-doctoral position Hellsten received at the Polin Institute of Theological Research. In the combined research project and study circle work, we investigated medieval travelling accounts and experimented with transdisciplinary research practices. In short, the project aimed to create a platform for transdisciplinary research collaborations that simultaneously trained people in transdisciplinary research skills while also developing methods and resources for doing transdisciplinary work. In addition to this, the transdisciplinary symposia investigated the relationship between praxis and social imaginaries in reading medieval travel accounts while critically inquiring about histories of othering, racialisation and the silenced voices from the past. The transdisciplinary approach was particularly focused on creating a platform that enabled dialogue and communal learning between Western dominant forms of academic research and Indigenous and traditional forms of knowledge.

That previous work functioned as a pilot project for what came to be the current project Hellsten leads: Praxis of Social Imaginaries – a Theo-artistic Intervention for Transdisciplinary Research at the Polin Institute of Theological Research. These pages are mainly dedicated to the continuous work within the Praxis project, where we now turn to investigate changes in human relations to creation in the shift from medieval to modern times. Particularly, the new formats the work takes when we collaborate more closely with the Centre of Excellence: Sustainable Ocean Sciences (SOS) at Åbo Akademi Foundation, as well as the landscapes, seas and local communities our project encounters in our coming symposia.

The people currently working on the project are: post-doctoral researcher Eduardo Abrantes (PhD, Roskilde University/ÅAU) and doctoral student Tinka Harvard (ÅAU). In addition to this, theo-artistic interventions that have come out of our project include: Spirit Land, Exploring Amazonian Cosmovisions and Teresa of Avila – Influence and Instrument

Furthermore, Indigenous theologian Shilulina Jamir (India) collaborates with us in our inquiries into developing polysemous reading practices and experimenting with theo-artistic interventions as practices for de-colonialising university education.