“Watching. Being. Tracing.” Perspectives from doctoral students on <i>tredje uppgiften</i> and curation as a pedagogical tool

Tredje uppgiften is the Swedish principle that foregrounds the obligation of the researcher to communicate their research to a public audience. While engaging with this principle to produce a public exhibition in rural Sweden on ethnographic research methods, we found that the act of curation confronted us with the need to actively and critically reflect on how we use and operationalise research methods in practice. As such, this paper accounts for how, by adopting the principle of tredje uppgiften, curation emerges as a novel pedagogical tool that encourages students to consciously reflecton the methodological foundations of their research. We describe how, for us, this act of curation took two forms: first as a curation of knowledge content and then as a spatially informed selection and positioning of that curated knowledge. Drawing upon our own experiences, we suggest that curation confronts students with thorny questions about their research methods, questions that productively encourage methodological reflexivity and a deeper understanding of the research process, before suggesting how curation might be operationalised as a teaching tool in a variety of geographical contexts.