On September 22 and 23, 2022, our dedicated team of researchers attended the kick-off seminar for the research program ‘Future Challenges in the Nordics – People, Culture and Society’ in Helsinki. The event took place at the Swedish-Finnish cultural center at Hannaholmen, and saw the participation of all projects in the program, representatives of the funders and politicians and other opinion leaders. It was indeed a high profile event to launch the programme and its ambitions of impact. We were represented by four researchers: Jan Canbäck Ljungberg, Bengt Andersen, Luna Secher Rasmussen, and our PI, Elena Raviola.
All projects were presented, showing a great breadth of subjects and questions that the Future Challenges program addresses. Researchers from Nordic countries in the program engage in current questions with interdisciplinary approaches and share a commitment to engage with the public debate and with decision-makers.
Elena Raviola presented our project and captivated the audience’s attention with the high relevance and the complexity of the question of Nordic borders as site of contention between openness and security. We were honored to receive feedback from Professor Olli Kangas from the University of Turku, who acknowledged the high ambitions of the project both in terms of interdisciplinarity and of extensiveness of fieldwork. The kick-off seminar provided also a platform for fruitful discussions among researchers from the other selected projects. We engaged in conversations, attended presentations and panel discussions centered around project communication. One of the seminar’s major achievements was its ability to bridge the gap between funding actors, decision-makers and researchers.
