For the last 75 years, the Nordic Summer University has made a habit of gathering in what one might consider “remote” places.[1] Though this is not often described as central to the mission of the organisation, the Nordic Summer University’s spaces of gathering – folk high schools, aged hotels, and summer camps – are nonetheless necessary to the Nordic Summer University’s multidisciplinary exchange and non-traditional research practices. Even the nomadicism of the Nordic Summer University symposia, the travel of the organisation’s events around the Nordic and Baltic regions, serves to tie together a vast territory with diverse communities and separated by national borders. Why does the Nordic Summer University practice this serial engagement with remote places? As a study circle organised within the Nordic Summer University, Studies in Remoteness begins with the context of the organisation itself – aiming to address its unique tactics of engagement with remoteness over the course of three years with the study circle’s wider theoretical and conceptual investigation of remoteness.

Given the Nordic Summer University’s long tradition of engaging with peripheral knowledges, places and individuals, the Studies in Remoteness aims to continue to reflect on remoteness and periphery. The topics central to the study circle started to emerge during the study circle 2022-2025 Praxis of Social Imaginaries. The project further engages with many current orientations within other study circles at the Nordic Summer University, including on questions of anti-colonial research practices, place-making, and community-based research practices.

Studies in Remoteness is resolutely interdisciplinary, dedicated to non-hierarchical and democratic decision-making practices, and committed to building meaningful relationships between scholars, artists, and cultural workers. The project also aims to make contributions to research on the value of art and culture to democracies.

Our strategies to meet the goals of the Nordic Summer University are as follows:

• A.   To engage with scholars, artists, and others pursuing long-term research projects relevant to the topic of remoteness, and to provide a context for research networking within this new interdisciplinary field.
• B.    To widen research publication production in the field of remoteness studies.
• C.    To increase the reach of circumpolar studies by identifying goals and struggles that are shared between circumpolar communities and other communities that experience “remoteness” or are externally identified as such.

[1] A list of past summer sessions can be found here: https://www.nsuweb.org/organisation/history/past-summer-sessions/