Lilli Mittner
Job description
I lead and coordinate research environments that bring gender studies into dialogue with the arts, the humanities and the environmental sciences:
- Leader: Artful Dementia Research Lab – Citizenscience on gendered dimensions of ageing, dementia, and what it means to live in difference together
- Academic coordinator: Centre for Arctic Humanities
- Co-founder: OceanPastFutures
- Vice-lead: Environmental humanities thematic network
- Co-leader: RESCAPE – feminist art intervention and performative historiography
- Coordinator: UiT’s BALANCEHUB
- Coordinator: Gender Balance in Art Education
- Member: UiT's Equality and Diversity Committee (Likestillings- og mangfoldsutvalget), 2026–2030
These roles involve research leadership and project development, supervision and teaching, coordinating interdisciplinary networks and seminar programmes, editorial and open-access publishing work, and institutional work on gender equality and diversity.
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Research interests
I research the gendered dimensions of human thought, performance, creation and relation, and the question of what it means to be human. With a master in musicology and media- and communication studies, I came to gender studies through the history of women's cultural work, and that training still shapes how I work: I attend to sound, gesture, timing and performance as sites where relations are made. My work starts from the premise that gender is relationally and continually made and remade: in institutions, in archives, in artistic practice, in care work, and in how bodies age and are read by others.
I develop situated art intervention as a research method: artistic practice designed as a research instrument, used to open questions that conventional methods leave closed. Alongside these creative methods I work with archival studies, content and multimodal analysis, aesthetic and diffractive analysis, discourse and policy analysis, qualitative and focus group interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork.
I work inter- and transdisciplinarily, with artists, social scientists and natural scientists. Feminist posthumanist theory and creative methods enter at every stage of a project, designing the study, generating and analysing material, and communicating findings, rather than being added at the end as outreach. This matters because knowledge is always situated: who asks, from where, with which body and which history, shapes what can be known. Working across art and science lets me attend to naturecultures and to human and more-than-human intra-actions, to the ways matter, meaning and power are entangled rather than separable.
Co-creativity is the organising principle of this work, and citizen science its most public form: research designed with participants rather than on them, which makes research ethics a question of relation and consent throughout a project rather than a form signed at its start. The same commitment runs through my work on open research and research communication, diamond open-access publishing, exhibitions, street galleries and public programming, because who can reach and contribute to knowledge is an equality question, not a dissemination one.
What I am specifically interested in
- Ageing, dementia and living in difference together. How we can think differently about ageing and dementia by looking to what happens between people, to feminist care as a shared practice, and to growth and a good life as something we make with one another.
- Planetary health and coastal cultures. How gender, labour and knowledge are organised along northern coastlines, and what feminist and Indigenous perspectives contribute to understanding ocean pasts and futures.
- Feminist historiography and performative research. Recovering and re-performing the histories of women's cultural work, and treating historiography itself as a performative act that makes certain pasts possible.
- Co-creativity as a rigorous concept. What distinguishes genuinely shared authorship of knowledge from participation and art as decoration.
Expertise
- Ageing and Dementia
- Citizen Science
- Coastal Cultures
- Co-creativity
- Creative Methods
- Gender and Gender Equality
- Historiography and Storytelling
- Open Research
- Research Communication
- Research Ethics
- Sound and Music
Member
- UArctic Thematic Network on Gender in Arctic Knowledge Production
- UArctic Thematic Network on Environmental Humanities
- International Research Network Arts & Dementia
Teaching
Høst 2026
TVR-3001 Creative Methods in Research and Communication
HSO-3101 Demens og psykisk helse i alderdommen
Vår 2025/2026
Online Course - Gender Equality as a Diverse Phenomenon (UArctic)
Vår 2023
HIF-2160 Tverrfaglige kjønnsstudier (Emneansvar)
Høst 2022
SVH-8002 ‘Research Communication’
Vår 2022
