Summary of the Interreg Aurora webinar: Equal and Inclusive Communication & Sustainability Practices

Tobias Björkskog from the project Borderless Game Academy started with a short presentation of the project and which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals that they had chosen in the project. He described that they had worked with the SDGs in events, in crossborder student projects, by creating crossborder courses and in a sustainability workshop series. The Borderless Game Academy has also worked intentionally with female representation to attract more women to their game events.

Mari Viinikainen presented the project MÁHTUT – Sámi knowledge and practices in the era of the green transition, that has chosen the Sustainable Development Goals number 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) and 15 (Life on Land) as their primary focus in the project. Mari described how the Sámi society are natural experts and pioneers in circular economy and self-sufficiency, and in the project they focus on the Sámi perspective on sustainability. Mari gave some examples of how the chosen SDGs have been interpreted in the project work.

Nurul Huda Mahmood and Aamir Mahmood presented the project RemotE seNsing and data fuSion integration for IndUstrial logistics in Rural ArEas with 6G (ENSURE-6G). Nurul started the presentation with an overview of the project idea and which challenges they want to solve in the ENSURE-6G project, with the short- and long term goals. After the introduction, Aamir described how the project team started the work with the SDGs by inviting a keynote speaker to inspire and empower the project team.

Ilona Grekelä and Tiia Kalske from the project Our Precious Transboundary Waters described the project’s work in three large river catchments in northern Finland and Norway. They showed what their process with the SDGs looked like and gave concrete examples on how they consider sustainability in their daily work. They also described which primary SDGs the project had chosen and how they connect the project activities to a chosen target for each SDG.

Tomas Gunnarsson, or The Gender Photographer gave us a vivid talk on how images and language can perpetuate or challenge gender stereotypes and exclusionary norms. Becoming aware of how they do so is the first step toward creating equal and inclusive communication. As the final speaker in the webinar, Tomas gave a lecture that was much appreciated and worth thinking about. Inclusive communication is about seeing your communication from the outside. It is also about mirroring the diversity in society. An easy way to start is to count the heads in the pictures that you present: how many are men and how many are women? Who is portayed as active and who is portrayed as passive in the image?

Tomas ended the presentation with concrete suggestions on how the pictures on the Interreg Aurora website could be improved to be more inclusive.

Tomas gave us the links to some of his work, that he mentioned in the lecture:
The Gender Photographer’s English guidebook about inclusive communication
Swedish version of the guidebook: Bilder som förändrar världen
The Picture of Us – about how to portray the countryside
Tomas is also working on a Norwegian guidebook, a project with Senter for likestilling, that is not yet published. He also mentioned Google’s All In Inclusive Marketing Insights

Thank you all speakers and participants for active contribution in this webinar!

Do you have feedback on the webinar that you would like to share with us – or do you run a project and would like to share your sustainability practices in a future webinar?
Please send an e-mail to: interregaurora@lansstyrelsen.se