28 March 2026 | 10:00 - 12:00 CET
Open Session - ON SITE ONLY
Room: Mødelokale 1
Organiser: Kelli Park (University of Southern Maine, USA)
Session Description:
This workshop introduces a novel leadership framework, True North Leadership, designed for academics and community leaders in Northern and Arctic regions. Grounded in Indigenous worldviews and complex systems thinking, the framework re-conceptualizes leadership as a dynamic process of navigation toward a shared vision of community well-being and cultural resilience. Participants will engage in a collaborative session to critically examine how tourism can be leveraged as a transformative force.
The workshop employs a relational compass as its central construct, with each cardinal direction representing a key thematic vector: Nurturing, Emergence, Stewardship, and Wisdom. Through a guided, narrative-based approach, attendees will articulate and share lived experiences that ground these concepts, with particular emphasis on how land-based experiences activate leadership in community resilience. This process culminates in the co-creation of a visual, systems-based model, where all components are depicted as interconnected and mutually influential. This model is fundamentally governed by the principles of The Right Relations (Relationality, Reciprocity, Responsibility, Respect, and Relevance), serving as the ethical core of the framework.
By synthesizing Indigenous epistemologies with academic rigor, this session aims to decenter conventional, hierarchical leadership paradigms. It offers a practical, conceptual framework for activating emergent leadership in connection with community engagement and cultural resilience and sustainability. The interactive approach fosters a space for collective knowledge production, empowering participants to build a leadership theory that is both contextually relevant and theoretically robust.