Forest bathing (shinrin yoku) is a Japanese ecotherapy practice known to restore physical and mental well-being in practitioners around the world. It is also a part of more complex nature-based interventions that can enhance pro-environmental behaviour among participants (Leao et al. 2025) and open up for broader values of and engagements with nature (Marini Govigli & Bruzzese 2023). During this workshop we will explore how forest bathing can be integrated with policy labs to stimulate new ways of thinking about and discussing forest management and restoration in the polarized forest debate.

In this 2 hour long workshop, we first invite participants to a forest bathing experience on the conference grounds with a trained forest bathing guide along with the presenters. The experience consists of a series of invitations that encourage participants to sensory engagement with surrounding nature, and ends with a tea circle. During tea we invite participants to a conversation on how we might integrate this methodology with other methods and utilise it in policy labs with forestry actors to stimulate forest restoration and governance dialogue.

For the participants:

Since we will sit still on the ground or walk only very slowly, participants should 

– wear warm clothing and even in warm weather long sleeves and trousers and closed shoes are recommended as a barrier to tick and mosquito bites. 

– Bringing mosquito repellent is recommended. 

– Bring rain gear if rain is forecasted. 

– Block the full two hours to be part of this experience and please meet us on time at the meeting point.

Sitting pads will be provided

Maximum number of participants: 15

Organizers

Judith Lundberg-Felten judith.lundberg-felten@slu.se (will guide the walk)
Carolyn Faithfull carolyn.faithfull@slu.se
Hedvig Nenzen hedvig.nenzen@slu.se
Patrik Oskarsson patrik.oskarsson@slu.se
Minh-Xuan Truong minh.xuan.truong@slu.se

References

Leao, E. R., Savieto, R. M., Borba, G. B., da Silva Victor, E., Bomfim, S. B., Hingst-Zaher, E., et al. (2025) Efficacy of a multicomponent nature-based intervention on well-being and environmental engagement: A randomized clinical trial. Environ Int, 196, 109286.

Marini Govigli, V., & Bruzzese, S. (2023). Assessing the emotional and spiritual dimension of forests: A review of existing participatory methods. Forest Policy and Economics, 153, 102990

This soundwalk builds on several years of my artistic research into diverse ways of connecting with arboreal and vegetal worlds through listening techniques. As we walk through the forest using various listening and recording technologies, we witness the soundscapes of trees, plants, and their multi-species ecosystems—sonic dimensions that normally remain imperceptible. Additionally, local ecosystems become gateways to more distant arboreal soundscapes that I have studied over the past several years, recordings of which I mix into different chapters of this evolving composition. For this purpose, I use a specially designed kit for immersive soundscape transmission, comprising a field recorder, a microcomputer, and a range of specialized microphones, including hydrophones, contact microphones, and geophones. Participants are equipped with receivers and headphones, allowing them to listen to this hybrid soundscape as we walk through the forest. The soundwalk concludes with a gathering and discussion on the benefits, challenges, ethical implications, and potential responsibilities that arise from our act of eavesdropping into diverse arboreal realms. 

For some more information about my research and similar soundwalks, please consider checking:

https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/arboreal-soundscapes/ and https://arowoftrees.co.uk/article/jacek-smolicki-arboreal-sonorities/ 

The soundwalk would be limited to 25 people and I would provide all necessary equipment. 

Jacek’s Bio: 

Jacek Smolicki, PhD, is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, designer and educator.

His work explores the critical, existential and technological dimensions of listening, recording and archiving in human and more-than-human contexts. Manifesting as soundwalks, soundscape compositions, experimental archives, and installations, his work has been presented internationally, including at Ars Electronica, Sonorities, and In-Sonora. He has, among other subjects, engaged in artistic work and written about the Canadian Pacific Coast soundscapes, tallest wooden radio mast in Europe, sounds of trees, alternative archives, ethics of field recording, and media archaeology of artificial voices. His edited book Soundwalking: Through Time, Space and Technologies was published by Routledge in 2023. Between 2020 and 2023, he was a Swedish Research Council postdoc grantee, and in 2022–23, he was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard. In 2019, he co-founded and ever since co-directed the Walking Festival of Sound.

www.smolicki.com

How do we feel about the future in times of crisis and continuous transition? What future(s) can we imagine when the world’s order is in flux? Shared Walks / Futures is an art-science collaboration that engages with these questions by creating an embodied, participatory experience for reflecting on futures in the context of environmental and societal change. It takes the participants out of the labaratory and explores how walking can be a method of artistic inquiry that fosters collective reflection on the possibility, desirability, openness and plurality of futures. Through a walkshop—a participatory walk followed by a roundtable reflection, participants explore future imaginaries through observation and creative collection. What to expect: We invite participants to follow a walking prompt provided to them and their randomly selected walking partner, and return after an hour of walking with a photo or an object to facilitate the group discussion at the reflection session. (No preparation is necessary, but remember to wear comfy shoes and weatherproof clothing, and please be at the meeting point in time.)
For the participants:

• Weatherproof clothing and comfy shoes (for one hour outdoors walk)
• Grab your lunch and meet us at the meeting point
• Blocking the full two and a half-hours for this session in your agenda and being at the starting point on time.
• No predefined paths or are necessary; participants are encouraged to navigate freely.
• Basic materials (e.g., notepads, pens) will be provided, though participants may also use personal devices.

Organisers:

Ayşem Mert, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University (aysem.mert@statsvet.su.se)
Tatiana Sokolova, Department of Environment, Development and Sustainability Studies, Södertörn University (tatiana.sokolova@sh.se)

This outdoor session engages with the forest as a site for knowing microbes outside of laboratory settings. Microbes are everywhere, always, and yet dominant understandings of microbes have been confined to technoscientific and visually-mediated ways of knowing them. The unifying theme of this session is to use more-than-visual means for knowing microbes, with specific attention to the sense of sound, scent, and proprioception. As scholars based outside of laboratory contexts, we have been developing microbial methods in the form of exploratory protocols. Some of these protocols have been trialled and iterated upon through collaborations with artists, artistic researchers, and practitioners. 

The session is dually meant to engage the wider STS community on discussions about more-than-laboratory knowledge production, as much as they are intended to help us hone these methods for future study. Planned activities include: 

1. Microbial Sounding, a protocol designed to reflect on the possibilities offered by sound to speculate about sociality and microbial presence in more-than-human ecologies
2. Holobiont Walk, a protocol designed to attune to microbes through multiple senses (especially proprioception) in a guided walk through the forest 

With a heads up to participants to bring all-weather attire and dress appropriately, both activities can take place regardless of rain. Participants will be informally asked for feedback (i.e., no records or identifiers). 

Session organizers and emails: 

Maya Hey, maya.hey@helsinki.fi 

Jose Cañada, jose.a.canada@helsinki.fi 

Aliisa Talja, aliisa.talja@posteo.fi 

This interactive workshop invites conference participants to engage with the exhibition RE:ACT…OR? not only as observers but as co-creators. The session begins with an artist-led tour introducing the exhibition’s central themes: abandonment, adaptation, and the overlooked potential of disused spaces. The artist shares insights into the creative process alongside stories of exploration and the buildings portrayed—what they once were, and what they’re becoming.

After the tour, participants conduct their own photographic exploration using mobile phones or cameras, focusing on textures, surfaces, and overlooked architectural traces. This embodied, site-specific activity fosters new ways of seeing and connecting with the built environment.

The workshop treats photography as both method and metaphor—inviting participants to reframe what we deem valuable, visible, or meaningful. No experience needed—just curiosity and a willingness to look again.

Facilitated by: Hannah Romano

This workshop – a rubber boot session – explores methods for sensing and studying morethan-human entanglements in disrupted ecologies. Rubber boot methods draw on traditional fieldwork’s emphasis on empirically grounded research attuned to the situated, lived and affective dimensions of a place, focusing particularly on more-than-human relations in a landscape (Swanson, 2022). In response to the conference’s invitation to reimagine the spaces where knowledge is created, shared, and transformed, the workshop proposes an experimental and interactive format that relocates outside of the laboratory and into the urban wetland of Uggelviken, situated between the campuses of KTH and Stockholm University. The session aims to explore how rubber boot methods can foster embodied, affective, and sensory engagements with mundane, yet complex, urban naturecultures in times of environmental and climatic crisis.

Uggleviken, like many urban wetlands, has been shaped by hydraulic engineering, modernist planning efforts to separate land from water and simplifications of their complex and entangled life forms. This framing reflects a long-standing Western dualism that perceives humans as separate from their environments—an epistemological stance that philosopher David Abram (2017) identifies as a perceptual problem rooted in the absence of attentiveness to the relational, more-than-human world. In response, this workshop engages sensory methods to cultivate deeper attentiveness to, and sensory reciprocity with, disrupted ecologies. It engages questions such as: how can ethnographic fieldwork, and other common STS-methodologies, be retooled to sense and study natureculture entanglements and the epistemic challenges they pose? How can such methodologies be performed in ways that also make room for critical self-reflexivity regarding the normative assumptions or relationships that they perform?

We –scholars from anthropology, archaeology, artistic research, human ecology, conservation/heritage studies, and urban studies – propose transdisciplinary agnosticism (Holmstedt, forthcoming) as a point of departure to foreground collective sense-making where not-knowing is embraced as an epistemic condition. Instead of seeking mastery over a research site, we use this session to collectively explore ways of learning with and through multispecies ecologies. We invite joining participants to collectively explore methods for surveying natureculture landscapes, moving beyond the prioritizing of the visual and changing the landscape gaze for the invocation of the sensous. This is done through methods drawing on tactile experiences, deep listening and slow walking as ways of attuning to the site’s multispecies and transtemporal materialising relations. The session will be concluded with a reflexive writing exercise. By tuning into the material, temporal, and affective registers of Uggleviken, this session creates space for storying the relations of the site and sharing experience-based reflections on how to study co-species entanglements in disrupted ecologies.

Duration: 2,5 hours. Participants are encouraged to wear shoes enduring watery grounds.

References

Abram, D. (2017). The Spell of the Sensuous. Perceptions and Language in a More-ThanHuman World. New York: Vintage Books.

Holmstedt, J. (Forthcoming). Soil Agnosticism. In Krzywozynska, A. & Toland, A. (Eds) Language of Soil – a handbook for transdisciplinary research.

Swanson, H. A. (2022). Rubber Boots Methods beyond the Field: Transformative Possibilities and Institutional Barriers in University Contexts. In N. Bubandt, A. O. Andersen, & R. Cypher (Eds.), Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene (pp. 348-370). University of Minnesota Press.

Organisers:

Christina Fredengren, christina.fredengren@arklab.su.seu

Emma Holmberg, emmho@kth.se

Janna Holmstedt, janna.holmstedt@shm.se

Jenny Lindblad, jenny.lindblad@abe.kth.se

Sofia Wiberg, sofia.wiberg@abe.kth.se