Wisdom Days: Science for Sustainability Transformations | 6-8 May, 2026

This workshop is only for pre-registered participants.

Room: B249 Suure at the JYU Library Lähde (B building), Seminaarinmäki campus

Workshop facilitators: Mikko Rönkkö, Ville Heilala

This workshop aims to provide doctoral students with hands-on experience and practical skills in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for various aspects of academic research. The workshop is designed to accommodate both beginners and those with some AI experience. 

Instructions for participants: It's not necessary to bring your own laptop, because we will use the computers available in the classroom. If you want to use your own laptop, you need to install LM Studio in advance. No other pre-assignments are required.

This workshop is only for pre-registered participants.

Room: Outdoors; meeting at the Paja building (I), Seminaarinmäki campus, then moving to the nearby natural environment

Workshop facilitator: PhD Kirsi Salonen

Welcome to the Flow with Nature (FWN) workshop, where you can experience nature and nature-based methods in the nearby nature of the University of Jyväskylä campus. Workshop facilitator (PhD) Kirsi Salonen is the main developer of the FWN method.

FWN is an evidence-based nature-based method that has been studied in working-age adults in Finland (e.g. Hyvönen et al., 2023; Salonen et al., 2022). According to studies, participating in FWN groups strengthens the sense of emotional nature connectedness, and increases well-being and mental health. Strengthening the emotional nature connectedness is also linked to environmental friendliness.

Instructions for participants: The workshop takes place outdoors in nature (also in rainy weather), so please be prepared with appropriate clothing.

This networking workshop will bring together sustainability researchers across Finland to map and discuss opportunities of collaboration in research proposals, communication and synergies in organizing sustainability conferences and other events for maximizing visibility and impact. Participants will also have an opportunity to share their visions on the future of sustainability research and sustainability science.

Coffee/tea and sandwiches will be served.

The side-event workshop is open by invitation only. If you wish to receive an invitation, kindly contact Tino Johansson (tino.johansson@helsinki.fi).

This session is only for pre-registered participants.

Room: S212 Old Seminar Hall, Seminarium building

Facilitators: Heidi Kukkonen, Satu-Emilia Myllymäki, Liisa Mäkinen, Kristóf Fenyvesi

This event is all about connecting with your fellow early-career researchers, including PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. Through a series of light, facilitated activities and informal interaction, it offers a relaxed and engaging space to network, exchange ideas, and spark potential collaborations. The session is facilitated by Kristóf Fenyvesi, a Senior Researcher at the University of Jyväskylä whose work focuses on creative, interdisciplinary and collaborative learning environments.

The aim is to offer a welcoming space for researchers at a similar career stage, one that fosters connection, expands your academic community, and provides a supportive environment for sharing your research story. Drinks and light snacks will be provided.

The venue is accessible, ensuring easy arrival for all participants. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact the conference organisers in advance.

Room: Main building (C) lobby

Achieving sustainability transformations requires academia, practical expertise, and society to work together more seamlessly than before. Therefore, we will begin our conference by combining the welcome reception with a stakeholder networking session. This event is a great opportunity to relax and mingle in a casual setting before the conference gets rolling. Drinks and snacks will be provided.

The evening will start with speed-talks from the stakeholder organizations' representatives. We are proud to introduce the organizations present at the event:

• Jamk University of Applied Sciences, the Institute of Bioeconomy
• Ramboll Finland Ltd
• the City of Tampere
• S Group
• Parks & Wildlife Finland
• The Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest Owners (MTK)
• Greenpeace Nordic
• Sweco Finland Plc

After these speed-talks there's ample time to network freely. The stakeholder representatives will be around for the entire evening for you to get acquainted with, ask questions, propose collaborations and exchange ideas on sustainability-related or, if you prefer, other topics. This is truly a great chance to pitch your research and ideas to these organizations and get fresh perspectives on your research topic by examining it in a more practical context.

Prior to the event we encourage you to consider how these organizations could enrich your future research, employment or study opportunities. How could you target your pitch to each organization? Or is there a stakeholder that could benefit from the results of your research?

All conference participants are most welcome to attend the event!

The stakeholders have been carefully selected to ensure their relevance for the conference audience. Many of them have also agreed to offer financial support for the conference to help keep the participation fees reasonable.

Room: Main building (C) lobby

Session C1: Transformations in Forest Systems

Room: Main building C1

Chair: Liia Raippalinna

Session C2: Business, Actors, and Agency in Transformations

Room: Main building C2

Chair: Janna Jokela

Session C3: Sustainable Business for Sustainable Futures

Room: Main building C5

Chair: Emma Nykänen

Session C4: Alternative Learning and Knowing for Change

Room: Main building C4

Chair: Elias Pielikko

Session C5: Co‑living in More‑than‑Human Worlds

Room: Seminarium S212

Chair: Satu Aavanranta

Workshop C6: Living with the tensions of sustainability transformations: An experiential approach using embodied ways of knowing

Room: Paja (I)

Team: Miia Toikka, Kirsi Hakio, Essi Huotari, Jari Autioniemi

Sustainability transformations are complex societal processes characterized by persistent tensions and dilemmas that impede effective action and innovation, often leaving actors overwhelmed. Advancing such transformations therefore requires holistic approaches that incorporate embodied intelligence – sensorial, intuitive, and relational ways of knowing – to complement rational thinking. Mobilizing multifaceted human intelligence is crucial for fostering collective learning, deepening understanding of the barriers, and enabling transformative change.  
 
This workshop offers an experiential exploration of sustainability tensions through embodied methods – approaches well-suited for engaging tacit, affective knowledge often neglected in conventional frameworks. Participants will engage in facilitated exercises to heighten awareness of embodied responses to complex sustainability dilemmas, building resilience and creative agility in high-tension situations. This approach highlights how embodied strategies can foster more nuanced engagement with sustainability tensions, contributing to the co-creation of sustainable futures.  
 
The aim of the workshop is to embody a new kind of space for action in tense situations. Participants will work with a personal theme relevant to sustainability within their research or practice – one that evokes feelings of tension. The session begins with grounding exercises to connect with the body and explore dialectical coexistence of conflicting experiences, enhancing capacity to hold opposing forces. 
 
A core method of the workshop is a constellation exercise, which facilitates embodied reflection on participants' relationships to sustainability tensions through movement in space. This approach is effective for visualizing relational dynamics and revealing fluidity and multiplicity of perspectives often overlooked in verbal analysis.  
 
The workshop concludes with group reflections, focusing on insights gained and how embracing tensions through embodied methods can contribute to sustainability transformations. These reflections will be utilized in further research on the potential of embodied practices in fostering relational shifts and holistic awareness as part of the RELIEF research project exploring the complexity of the legal system

Keywords: embodied intelligence, embodied methods, sustainability tensions, co-creation

Workshop C7: Finding Your Media Voice to Amplify Sustainability Transformations

Room: Seminarium S204

Team: Sini Holopainen, Susanna Lehvävirta 

This workshop is a highly interactive 80-minute session, designed as a practical skills lab. It will blend short facilitator inputs with collaborative exercises. The aim is to help researchers to find their comfort zone in approaching media and producing content, having a strong/deep sustainability approach as a starting point in the process.  
 
Media plays a crucial role in informing the public and decision makers of matters of importance. Therefore, it is an important channel and co-operating partner for sustainability researchers in their efforts to gain publicity to their research.  
 
Two key Questions to be Explored: 

• How can I, as a sustainability scientist, communicate my research effectively with the media?
• What is my authentic communication style, and how can I use it in media interactions (interviews, podcasts, op-eds) to bridge the gap between research and public discourse?

Elements of the workshop:  
 
We will use a variety of facilitating methods to ensure everyone can participate in a meaningful way. These include mind mapping, paired & small group discussions, interactive polling and structured end discussion.
 
Facilitators represent media expertise and sustainability science with both journalist and researcher backgrounds.
 
This workshop directly enables the "putting into action" of sustainability transformations by focusing on the individual and collective agency of the scientist as a communicator. 
 
The workshop is facilitated by Media at Planetary Boundaries project’s Susanna Lehvävirta (project leader), and Sini Holopainen (project planner). The project is based at HELSUS, University of Helsinki, and is funded by the Kone Foundation.

Keywords: media, sustainability transformation, communication

Room: Main building (C) lobby

Discussion themes at the open tables:

1. What is a just sustainability transformation, and how can we move toward it?
2. Is it possible to design an economic system that enables sustainability? How?
3. How can we maintain hope and imagine more sustainable futures?

During each coffee break, you’re invited to join our unfacilitated, open discussion tables. These tables are an opportunity for participants to meet, exchange ideas, and explore key themes together. Three tables will be available during every break, each presenting a different topic. You’re free to join any conversation, introduce yourself, share what brought you there, or simply listen in.

These discussions are informal and participant‑led, offering a chance to hear diverse perspectives and connect with others in an open and inclusive atmosphere. Feel welcome to come and go as you like!

Session D1: Capacities for Transformations

Room: Main building C1

Chair: Corinna Casi

Session D2: Energy and Twin Transitions: Institutional Perspectives

Room: Main building C5

Chair: Emma Nykänen

Session D3: Youth Activism and Active Citizenship

Room: Main building C4

Chair: Katri Savolainen

Session D4: Biodiversity Accounting for Nature-Positive Futures

Room: Seminarium S212

Chair: Saara Vauramo

Workshop D5: Slow Embodied listening to the Earth

Room: Outdoors; meeting in front of the Paja building (I). In case of rain, in the Paja building

Team: Hanna Ellen Guttorm, Alyssa Coffin

Many Indigenous peoples still have diverse rituals and ceremonies, where they remind each other about the intercontectedness of humankind and other nature and celebrate the flow of the energy going through all of them/us. Many of these ceremonies are based on slow and respective listening. Many Indigenous people have lost the ceremonies, but still live in close connection with the Land, in close reciprocal listening (in North Sámi gulahallat) of the lands, animals and weathers.  
 
In this workshop we recognize our bodies and body-minds as pieces of the Earth through silent listening and slow exercises. This workshop is also a small step towards "re-indigenizing the people of the planet to the planet" (John Mohawk 2008). Re-indigenizing can mean bringing back the Earth-based and community centered ways of thinking, feeling and acting on the planet. It can mean understanding the circularity of everything, it means understanding the place and responsibility of the humankind of taking care of the other multibeings, Earthlings, of the planet.   
 
The methods in our workshop will include  all kinds of relating with the Land through attention and perception, connecting and gathering through body and all the senses, and breathing the land, as science has revealed that all the different bacteria of the land are good for us. The workshop will include listening the environment and following the invitations of it and connecting with each other through open eyes, ears and bodily gestures. 
 
The facilitators of this workshop are an Indigenous Sámi scholar, who as an adult has worked with revitalising the connection with the Earth, also through learning from other Indigenous peoples, and an American interdisciplinary artist, who wants to cultivate relationship with Finland through creating indigenizing practices.

Keywords: listening, slowness, embodiment, Earth

Workshop D6: Placemaking Maptivity - A serious game for sustainable urban development

Room: Seminarium S204

Team: Tamara Hajdu, Oula Terttunen

This workshop introduces Placemaking Maptivity, an interactive serious game designed to support community stakeholders in envisioning and co-creating smart and sustainable neighbourhoods. Built on systems thinking, stakeholder engagement principles, and serious gaming methodologies, the Maptivity integrates the ISO 37101 standard for sustainable community development as a guiding framework. This ensures that local initiatives explored during the game are aligned with internationally recognised sustainability objectives. 
 
In this hands-on workshop, participants are invited to become familiar with the ISO standard for sustainable community development through a collaborative card-based gameplay. Working in interdisciplinary teams, participants will take on the roles of various community actors and work toward a shared goal: designing a sustainable neighbourhood. The game encourages critical thinking, negotiation, and creativity while illustrating how different priorities and resources interact within complex urban systems. 
 
By participating, attendees will experience how the Maptivity strengthens cross-sector collaboration, enhances informed decision-making, and accelerates the development of locally grounded sustainability strategies. The workshop aims to demonstrate how communities can move from fragmented initiatives to coordinated, impactful transformation, making sustainability concepts concrete, practical, and achievable.

Keywords: sustainable communities, urban planning, serious game

Workshop D7:  Inclusive planning process for Nature-Based Solutions: a role-play approach to sustainability education

Room: Seminarium S203

Team: Oskari Ylikoski, Elina Oksanen, Tiina Ynnilä

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have been identified by the European Commission as key strategies for addressing sustainability challenges, including sustainable urbanization, ecosystem restoration, climate adaptation and environmental risk management. However full embedment of NBS as real tools to combat societal challenges has not happened. This far, NBS has tended to serve high-income areas, which is unfair to the disadvantaged groups in society (Anguelovski et al. 2022). Like with other sustainability related solutions, NBS is also subject of green washing. Focusing on transparent decision making processes is essential regarding NBS.

eNaBlS is an EU/Horizon project aiming to create new ways for Higher Education Institutes to teach and discuss about Nature-Based Solutions, using education as a way of streamlining NBS to society at large. Recent eNaBIS survey by Keryan et al. (2025) revelated that the integration of NBS in univerity curricula remains fragmented, with limited interdisciplinary collaboration and a noticeable gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. However, innovative formats such as Living Labs and co-creation with societal actors was found to have strong potential to support transformative, challenge-based learning.

In this workshop we want to introduce an educational exercise designed to foster systems thinking and simulate inclusive decision making among students. Participants will simulate NBS planning processes, using realistic information about a case location, including ecological, environmental and socio-economic data. Combining information processing and role play we want to create a possibility for students to explore what is important in NBS planning.

By piloting this approach during Wisdom Days, we aim to collect feedback on its pedagogical value and explore how this kind of learning can help future professionals to integrate NBS into society in a fair and effective manner. The session is relevant for educators and researchers interested in transformative sustainability education.

Keywords: Nature-Based Solutions, biodiversity, education, systems thinking

We recommend the following restaurants, which are able to accommodate large numbers of people:

• Restaurant Lozzi (P building)
• Restaurant Taide (B building)

Please visit the restaurants' websites to see daily menus.

You may also be interested in the following:

• Restaurant Tilia (T building) - smaller capacity, no student-priced lunch
• Café Belvedere (Main building C)
• Café Tiede (B building)

Session E1: Decolonial and Just Transformations

Room: Main building C1

Chair: Heli Kukkurainen

Session E2: Professions and Workplaces in Transition

Room: Main building C2

Chair: Linda Majander

Session E3: Collective Action, Art and Agency

Room: Main building C4

Chair: Anna-Kaisa Koski

Session E4: Ways of Living in Planetary Well‑being

Room: Seminarium S212

Chair: Corinna Casi

Session E5: Regenerative Business and Sustainable Economic Futures

Room: Seminarium S204

Chair: Claudia Kovács

Workshop E6: An Ocean of Webs Drowned In Every How

Room: Main building C5

Team: Ni Lin

In the non-linear happenings, An Ocean of Webs Drowned In Every How, I will invite participants to lay down, fall asleep, and dream as soft words about human/non-human entanglement were spoken and bounced off the walls of a defunct fish processing facility inside a fish factory in Iceland and travel through routes of broken web in the ocean globally. How does the ocean speak to the land? How does an artist provide alternative experiences in communication and initiate re-connection to deeper time? Petrichor—the rain’s breath upon the earth—mingles with the briny scent of the sea, with sulfurous whispers of dimethyl sulfide, with the ghost of phytoplankton and fish; and through the cylindrical metal walls of the fish silo, the ferry horn resounds like a distant summons from the ocean floor. Then, sounds of air reverberated through broken maps, touched and played by my toes and fingers, were recorded and transported through electrical signals accompanied by prepared instruments. “How does Land teach us—and how do we listen through creative practice?” Through underwater fieldwork, performative lecture workshop, I will bring forth experiences of ocean immersions to land, and invite participants to listen to these deep echoes of jellyfish, whales, historical-current narratives…and reflect, imagine, and dream on possibilities of collective re-inhabitation.

Keywords: participatory action, decolonization, ocean, sustainable transition

Room: Main building C1

Title: Regenerative dynamics for sustainability

Prof. Jörn Fischer is professor of sustainable landscapes at the Social-Ecological Systems Institute (SESI) of Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. His recent work has focused on the intersection of food security and biodiversity conservation in southwestern Ethiopia. His research spans three continents, including Australia, Europe, and Africa. He has authored over 200 journal articles, making significant empirical and conceptual contributions to the field.

In his keynote, Prof. Fischer will explore the emerging concept of regenerative dynamics for sustainability. Notions of regeneration have entered discourses in several fields that are relevant for sustainability, including, among others, ecology, agriculture, economics, management, sociology, psychology and chemistry. A review of existing work shows that there are interesting parallels between these fields. By carefully defining key concepts, such as regenerative dynamics, regenerative practices and regenerative momentum, it is possible to derive generalized insights about what characterizes regenerative systems. Such insights, in turn, promise to spark new insights for sustainability science and practice, and could help to foster new, integrative developments across multiple areas of sustainability practice.

This tour is only for pre-registered participants.

Location: Outdoors; meeting at the lobby of the JYU Main building (C), then moving around the Seminaarinmäki campus

Facilitators: Heidi Kukkonen, Satu-Emilia Myllymäki, Liisa Mäkinen, Hanna Keljo

Sustainability transitions require not only systemic change but also a renewed attentiveness to our everyday environments. On Friday’s excursion, we invite you to join a guided walk through the scenic surroundings of the university’s historic botanical garden.

The tour will be led by Hanna Keljo, coordinator and head gardener of the botanical garden collection at the University of Jyväskylä. During the tour, you will also hear short research presentations (five mins each) by researchers Alicja Staniszewska, Katri Savolainen and Reetta Puolitaival, offering insights into current research on sustainability transitions.

The excursion is an invitation to rethink how our practical involvement with the landscape shapes and is shaped by the diversity of more-than-human relations. Whether you are looking to recharge, explore new perspectives or connect with others, this walk offers a gentle closing to the conference.

Instructions for participants: After the keynote session ends at 15:50, coffee/tea and little snacks will be served for the tour participants in the Main building lobby. We will gather there first and start the tour from the lobby at 16:10. The guided tour will last up to 90 minutes and will conclude at the starting location. The excursion will be held entirely outdoors, so please dress appropriately for changing weather conditions. Umbrellas will be available to borrow in case of rain.

The tour takes place in a garden with grassy and sloped paths. Please note that some areas have uneven terrain, making them partially inaccessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact the conference organisers in advance so we can assist you.