Aboagora Research Retreat: Repairing for Peace
7.-9.9.2025
Archipelago Research Institute
Seili
The ABOAGORA Retreat VIII: Repairing for Peace invited MA Arts Students and Doctoral Researchers in the arts, humanities, and sciences to imagine peace at the time of accelerating militarisation. Facilitated by Taru Elfving, the retreat brought together a group of ten researchers from different fields ranging from visual arts, arts education and literature to sociology, law, technology, and peace research.
The retreat searched for imaginaries of peace that address the interconnections between societal and ecological breakdown across local and global scales. It set out to bring together research from different fields that critically and creatively examine militarisation and securitisation, historical and today’s peace movements, narratives of resistance to the languages and logics of war, collective practices that actively repair the ground for peace, or other related topics:
What kind of peace is promised by the securitisation of all aspects of everyday life? How to repair relations needed for peace as something other than a transactional, compromised or predetermined contract? The current time of escalating conflicts over resources and reorganisation of the global axes of power urgently calls for solidarities between situated struggles. We are witnessing a steep reversal of the progress achieved in recent decades on both social justice and ecological protections. Militarisation as a deterrent against war is already a state of exception, a looming disaster for the environment and for democracy. It can only be countered by intersectional alliances between resistance movements that are now largely dispersed across generational, identitarian, cultural and geographical divides.
The retreat aimed to offer a momentary pause in habitual patterns and processes of practice, and space to share, listen and reflect attentively together. It also implied a retreat from the conventions of boundary-making between disciplines and epistemologies, in order to nurture an ecology of practices. The programme was structured around talks, walks and workshops focused on the dialogue and sharing of research questions and methods between the participants. The island of Seili with its multifaceted history and ecology informed the activities. The retreat also included an introduction to the work of the Archipelago Research Institute co-hosting the retreat with CAA.
ABOAGORA – Between Arts and Sciences is an annual symposium that brings together academia, the arts and society. The 2025 main event was held September 10–12 at the Sibelius Museum in Turku, where the research retreat participants presented their work in a panel discussion. ABOAGORA is a joint effort by the University of Turku, the Turku University Foundation, Åbo Akademi University, the Åbo Akademi University Foundation and the Arts Academy of Turku University of Applied Sciences.
