#Metsätiede2025
Afternoon parallel session of the Human-Forest Relationship Research Club
Forests are and have been a crucial part of societal changes — both directly and indirectly — and this remains the case in the current era of ecological crisis and sustainability transitions. In this context, forests are ascribed multiple critical roles and functions, aimed at mitigating biodiversity loss and climate change, as well as tackling broader issues of unsustainability in societal operations. Meanwhile, the critique towards the forest sector is getting strong, and forests and their use are facing great and partly conflicting pressures. Our relationships with forests are undergoing a profound transformation at the moment.
Societal relationships with forests shift and are reconfigured over time and across various spatial levels, while the cultures existing in the society and affecting those relationships live and change. Different individual and collective forest relationships, including the relationships between different actors that shape individual relationships, as well as the understandings and valuations tied to them also transform. Agency and relationships between different actors, especially power relationships with conflicts included in them are, thus, inseparable parts of the societal transformation. These social and cultural relationships create layers in forests, intertwining with different dimensions of a temporal continuum.
During the afternoon session of the Human–Forest Relationship Research Club at the Forest Sciences’ Day, we will explore the layered nature of forest-related relationships in the context of societal transformations.
Presentations of the Human–Forest Relationship Research Club’s afternoon session will address e.g., the following questions:
- What kinds of social, regional, and temporal layers can be found in forests and in human–forest relationships and the relationships between different actors shaping them?
- How do these different layers and their associated relationships become visible and transform in the context of broader societal shifts and transitions, especially during the current sustainability transition?
- What kind of power relationships and layers affecting current societal transformation can be found in forests and forest relationships?
We invite presentations related to this theme. Please submit a one-page abstract by 24 August 2025 to Emmi Salmivuori (emmi . salmivuori [] uef . fi) or Kaisa Vainio (kaisa . vainio [] utu . fi). They can also provide additional information about the session.
Please follow the guidelines in this sample abstract.