| Summary: | Abstract This autoethnographic dissertation is a story of a transformational journey, initiated by necessity to critically engage with questions of power/knowledge relationships in international higher education in Finland. As a student/teacher/researcher in international study programs, I found it compelling to think with (de)coloniality/modernity to attend to my complicities and responsibilities in this context, so imbued with dilemmas of epistemic injustice. Living autoethnographic inquiry with this lens became also a matter of reclaiming the unified body-mind-spirit as a legitimate site and mode of knowing/being. While autoethnography as a process emerged organically from my academic experiences, as a product, it emerged from the process of writing from the body as inquiry, buttressed by three important encounters: butoh; the multidisciplinary artist Hanna Ojala; and Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue. These modes of knowing/being, each sprouting from a different timespace, have come to permeate my educational and researcher praxis, pointing towards holistically nurturing bodymindspirit capacities to encounter uncertainty and the unknown, enabling unlearning in order to imagine alternative forms of living. They intersect and enter dialogues with each other throughout the story, creating spaces for decolonial gestures within and beyond academia. This performative dissertation—a decolonial gesture—is an account of these strange dialogues and their potential for personal and community transformation. It is an invitation to such dialogue. The dissertation is structured around the four seasons of the subarctic climate. Each season-chapter is an entry point to a different dimension of the transformational process. Each chapter has its own role and focus, but none can exist without the others. The reader can follow the cycle beginning with any season. This circular structure emerged organically and offers the reader a sense of the tempos and rhythms that drove the inquiry, yet it leaves a possibly individual ...
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