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.

During the same time as the study circle operated, the Praxis of Social Imaginaries – a Theo-artistic Intervention for Transdisciplinary Research project gained a starting grant from the Polin Institute of Theological Research Thus, the practices piloted in the context of NSU could be expanded into a full research project where the community has developed methods like polysemous reading and theo-artistic interventions now further explored in the special issue with the journal Arts.

The people and artistic work supported by the Praxis project are: post-doctoral researcher Eduardo Abrantes (PhD, Roskilde University/ÅAU), doctoral student Tinka Harvard (ÅAU), Spirit Land, Exploring Amazonian Cosmovisions and Teresa of Avila – Influence and Instrument.

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

From the beginning of 2026, the previous research takes new forms when Hellsten and Abrantes start collaborating more closely with the Stiftelsen Åbo Akademi Centre of Excellence: Sustainable Ocean Sciences , CHARM-EU network and local island communities in the Åland Islands and Archipelago Sea region. We have now initiated a new project: Island Dwelling along the Franciscan Trail: Attending to Sea-Land Knowledge through Theo-Artistic Interventions.