Let’s call it “time work”: Those practices that negotiate the relations between the living and the dead. Time work is not merely conducted by archivists and historians, but by grave diggers and undertakers, documentary filmmakers and memoirists, knowledge bearers, politicians, war journalists, practitioners of living traditions, speakers of dead languages, as well as by any and all who keep something – a story, a trinket, an heirloom, a song – holding onto it to remember. Time work is not easily done without feeling; It is driven by the weight of mattering, it is attention called by the fact that now – this, ‘our’ now – is in-part composed by the shadows of what and who came before. Time work is haunting work, it whispers of recurrences (“this happened before”), and implicitly describes the present as a thing pushed to the surface of existence by the collective force of innumerable spent lives, over centuries, over millennia.
In the summer 2026 Studies in Remoteness symposium, we explore the ways that time work might destabilize the remoteness of history – its absence, distance, and neglect. How might we describe the work that transforms time into a weighted force that accumulates, persists, and can be carried forward, often across generations? Through what actions is one accountable to the past? What does it mean to hold or carry an inheritance? In what ways are people indebted to those who came before, and how might the living “pay the debts” that have accumulated over generations? What kinds of temporalities do different approaches to time work produce, and what social relations are then enabled or foreclosed? Through these questions, the symposium reflects on the entanglement of debt and history, exploring debt as an enduring paradigm that variously informs intergenerational relations, systems of oppression, and historical justice. We particularly invite proposals that engage with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems.
TIME WORK.
Debt, inheritance, and intergenerational practice.
Summer 2026 Studies in Remoteness Symposium
Hosted by the Nordic Summer University in Saulkrasti, Latvia
24-31 July 2026
https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/remoteness/
https://www.nsuweb.org/circle-1-studies-in-remoteness-sensoria-of-absence-distance-and-neglect/
Studies in Remoteness does foundational theoretical, artistic, and historical work toward initiating a new field of interdisciplinary research in critical remoteness studies. To unpack the geopolitical, environmental, and cultural dimensions of ‘remoteness’ – particularly in Nordic, Baltic, circumpolar, and other such “far” (from whom?) northerly regions – we center Indigenous scholarship and critiques of extractive colonialism, as well as artistic and embodied research approaches, in a series of six symposia across the Baltic rim between 2026-2028.
The project turns its attention to regional peripheries or cartographic borderlands between nation states; the residential areas of Indigenous and minoritized communities; historical testimonies and lacunae; sub-cultural meeting spots, or your neighbour’s kitchen.… Theorizing modernity by turning to its so-called outskirts, the project inquires sensoria of absence, distance, and neglect that have blossomed along the frontiers of colonial empires and sedimented among the margins of modern infrastructures of “global connectivity”. With lingering attention, Studies in Remoteness intends to unsettle conditions of obscuring or exoticising – resolutely acknowledging histories, topographies and epistemologies with an eye to how these might come into “intense proximity”, as coined by Okwui Enwezor.
Studies in Remoteness is coordinated within the Nordic Summer University by the scholar Lindsey Drury and artistic researcher Helena Hildur W., in cooperation with project members Tinka Harvard, Shiluinla Jamir, and Essi Nuutinen, in cooperation with Karolina Enquist Källgren (Stockholm University/Nordic Summer University), Stéphanie Barillé (Nordic Summer University), among others.
About Studies in Remoteness
HOW TO APPLY
The Studies in Remoteness summer 2026 session “Time Work” will be structured into a series of thematic days based on participant proposals. Applicants are invited to envision research presentations, speaker panels, short workshops, performances, experiments, roundtables, and reading and/or discussion sessions. Applications should include :
[a] an abstract of the proposed contribution;
[b] bio(s) of the presenter(s);
[c] statement describing financial need (or institutional support)
– 1-3 pages total please!
Dates to be aware of:
April 9, deadline for proposals from those applying for NSU scholarship
May 1, deadline for proposals from those with secured funding (institutional, self-funded, etc.)
May 15, deadline for non-presenting participant applications*
June 1, last day for registration and payment
*Non-presenting participants are very welcome, but we are at this time unable to support their attendance with scholarship or grant funding.
Email applications to:
lindsey.drury@fu-berlin.de
helenahildur@gmail.com
Who can apply?
Studies in Remoteness is dedicated to fostering an intellectually rigorous and practice-inclusive context equally open to researchers, educators, artists, curators, architects, community leaders and elders, activists, students, among others. The project aims to create meeting grounds for collaborative and community-based research work that critically and productively inquires infrastructure, visibility, performativity, and historicity. The Nordic Summer University offers ECTS points to students.
We welcome proposals on topics, including, for example:
- Community-based and civic historical research
- Artistic, performative, or practice-based engagements in time work and historical remoteness
- The body as an archive of historical experience, trauma, labour, or obligation
- Historical theory and method in Black, Indigenous, and/or Feminist research
- Erasure, silence, and absence in archives, narratives, and memory practices
- Affective histories and lasting emotional effects of remoteness
- Intimate encounters with landscapes shaped by history (forests, shorelines, ruins, infrastructures)
- Historical displacement, exile, and forced migration
- Intimate approaches to history, erotohistoriography and queering of historical practice
- Ritual, ceremony, practices of intergenerational memory and inheritance
- How burdens, obligations, or unresolved pasts are carried across generations
- Contemporary forms of debt, dependency, or exploitation as continuations of historical remoteness
- Taylorism, industrial imposition of labour-time, Marxism and temporal reclamation
- Gleaning and other practices of subsistence as artistic and historical practices
- Manuscripts, archival materials, historical texts, and storytelling traditions as sites and traces of historical remoteness and time work
- Material traces of remoteness and their afterlives
- Translation, mediation, and transmission across historical distance
DETAILED INFORMATION ON SUMMER SESSION PRACTICALITIES
Place: Minhauzen Unda, Ainažu iela 74, Saulkrasti, Latvia
Dates: 24 July – 31 July 2026
The 2026 Summer Session gathers all study circles of the Nordic Summer University.
Participants arrive in the afternoon/evening on 24 July.
Summer session prices include housing and food (full room and board) for the week.
Cost for participants without institutional support (full room and board, July 24-31 2026):
100 €: NSU Scholarship price for full room and board for the week in shared 4-bed rooms
700 €: Full room and board, bed in double room (shared with one other participant)
950 €: Full room and board, single room (not shared)
500 €: Camping with access to shared bathrooms with showers + breakfast, lunch, dinner, and
snacks for the week.
Studies in Remoteness is working hard to fund the participation of those with financial need.Participants who need funding support should send in their proposal as early as possible and express this in their applications. Nordic Summer University also offers limited scholarships (by application).Additionally, there are a number of travel/conference grants we can recommend to participants to apply to independently.
Cost for participants with institutional support (full room and board, July 24-31 2026):
900€: Institutional price for PhDs/any room type
1250€: Institutional price for employed scholars/any room type
Participants with families (full room and board, July 24-31 2026):
1000 €: Full room and board in a double room for 1 adult and 1 child
1200 €: Full room and board in a family room for 1 adult and 2 children
1500 €: Full room and board in a family room for 2 adults and 1 child
1800 €: Full room and board in a family room for 2 adults and 2 children
Attending children aged 4+ are welcome to join the Children’s circle, with two circle coordinators who plan activities for the kids running the course of the week.
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