Towards Decolonial Arctic Research Relations: Co-creating spaces for shared embodied experiences in a European research community

This article is about ways of co-creating spaces of engagement that foster the development of decolonial research relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners. It uses the example of a specific European research community focused on the Arctic that is embedded in the history and lasting legacies of Nordic Colonialism. The article engages with academic practices that define these spaces of engagement, and we draw our empirical material from experiences in and observations from a joint workshop. We are interested in better understanding how relations are formed, and we place a focus on the body to take into consideration the varying histories and lived realities we carry when entering a workshop space. We highlight embodied and sensorial dimensions of our encounter to describe how we connect and communicate with and through our bodies. We suggest that this allowed us to co-create a space of engagement that enabled workshop participants to come together respectfully, considerate of various ways of knowing and being in this world, and reflective of their/our own positionalities.