January 2025 – Melody Lynch

Submission deadline: January 31^st 2026

There is a growing expectation for Arctic research to be able to effectively inform decision-makers and support communities to achieve local, regional, and national priorities. Yet, there continues to be a disconnect between knowledge users and holders in the context of Arctic research, and limited context-specific guidance on ways forward to bridge the divide. How can we better share Arctic knowledge between communities, scientists, policymakers, industry, and the broader public? How can we better mobilize scientific and local knowledges to effect change?

We invite knowledge holders and researchers to contribute to papers that highlight practices, processes, and results of current knowledge mobilization initiatives in the Arctic. We understand knowledge mobilization broadly as the ways in which knowledge is made available in relevant, useful, and meaningful formats at the right times for different knowledge users, and can include knowledge synthesis, co-production, or exchange. We encourage empirical, methodological, and theoretical interventions and invite contributions from different disciplines, sectors, and geographical contexts in the Arctic. We welcome submissions focused on the access and use of knowledge and are keen to highlight pieces from Indigenous knowledge holders and young professionals from across the circumpolar Arctic. We welcome submissions that include creative and unconventional efforts to mobilize knowledge (e.g. visual art, podcasts, video, land-based experiential activities) that explore the above themes in novel ways.

Consider submitting here!

This research highlights the ways by which processes of caring for our environments can contribute to health and well-being for the minded body. Drawing upon rich ethnographic accounts of urban cultivation practices and experiences, this research unfolds in the birthplace of the ‘Healthy City’ concept—Kuching, Malaysia—which is an ethnically diverse city home to Chinese, Malay, Indigenous and other groups. Building from situated political ecologies—and more specifically, emotional political ecology and the political ecology of religion—I examine the relational values produced through practices of urban cultivation and related benefits for mind-body-environments. I find spirituality, religion, gender, generation, class, and ethnicity are embodied in socionatural relationships facilitated through urban agriculture. Through affective encounters with non-human animals, spiritual meanings inferred from the materiality of plants, and strengthened socionatural relationships with friends, family, even strangers, and the divine, practices of urban cultivation can nurture minds, bodies, and environments in deeply interconnected ways. This adds to a growing literature that reveals the importance of relational values for well-being and argues that socionatural relationships of care can contribute to a meaningful life. With a careful attention to relational dynamics and differentiated embodied experiences, I show that cultivators engage in the production of ecologies of care that confront neoliberal modes of interacting with themselves and others. Recognizing that care is embodied, situated and political can foster more nuanced understandings of the politics of socioecological transformation.

Month: January 2025

Contribute to our special collection – research to effect change: ways forward for knowledge mobilization in the Arctic

New publication: planting flowers for the bees