Join us for a Warm Data Lab hosted by Åse Eliason Bjurström, Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri and Miriam Sannum at ClimateExistence 2026!
This Warm Data Lab invites participants into a process of shared inquiry across multiple contexts, drawing on Nora Bateson’s work on Warm Data and transcontextual mutual learning. This approach resonates with an ecological epistemology, where knowledge is understood as being alive within relationships rather than as fixed representations.
ClimateExistence is organized in collaboration with the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society, CRS, Uppsala University.
When: November 16-18, 2026
Where: Uppsala, Sweden
Registration: https://doit.medfarm.uu.se/bin/kurt3/kurt/8900367 (see form for conference fees)
Åse Eliason Bjurström works across different forms of ecological epistemologies between formal and informal contexts. Interested in how different contexts shape and limit what becomes possible to perceive, think, say, do and be, and in how relational learning can become a foundation rather than simply a method. Her work moves in dialogue with drama-based research, Nora Bateson’s Warm Data – information that’s alive, transcontextual learning and critical adult learning. She is also a small-scale farmer, developing communal farming as well as engaged in NavVäst, a polycentric learning node.
Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri is pharmacist, transdisciplinary researcher (at Nordic Summer University), photographer and warm data host. Vitalija is also a gardener and co-creator within urban communities such as Brussels Health Gardens focusing on therapeutic and artistic nature-based health practices for resilience and personal exploration in possible becoming. In her work she is focusing on relational lived experiences shared between humans and more than humans
Miriam Sannum is a senior ecologist who has hosted Warm Data Labs and other transformative learning processes in many shifting contexts. She has worked with local civic societies, authorities, researchers and mixes of groups from local to intercontinental. No matter what group or what geographical scoop – always inviting all aspects of life experience as well as imagination. Miriam lives on a farm and is constantly weaving her practical and relational actions and insights with theoretical and philosophic perspectives in her lifelong learning. The grandchildren are her most inspiring peers in playful exploration and stamina in hope.
How can we stay with the trouble and dwell in the collapsing space between the urgent and the eternal?
The global landscape of 2026 is defined by a sense of fracture and eroding baselines. We see it in the stalling currents of the Atlantic and the geopolitical tensions stretching from the Arctic to the Middle East. As carbon budgets dwindle and the 2030 threshold looms, the distance between scientific projections and our lived reality has vanished. We inhabit a strange paradox where we are simultaneously running out of time and standing at the threshold of a new, long-lasting era of instability. In the face of tipping points and a shifting world order, we gather in Uppsala to search for meaning and community, feeling our way through the darkness.
How do we maintain a sense of place and direction when the natural and political maps are being redrawn and discarded? In an age of extreme weather and ecological loss, how do we navigate the tension between immediate crisis and the slow, deep time of the earth? If the systems we relied upon are failing, what new bridges can we build between the practical needs of survival and the existential need for meaning? How can we stay with the trouble and dwell in the collapsing space between the urgent and the eternal?
CEMUS, CRS, and Uppsala University invite you to join us for an engaging ClimateExistence conference! We aim to be a creative meeting place for artists, activists, academics, faith practitioners, and anyone interested in the existential and practical aspects of the climate emergency.