This presentation explores how images of the future, as they appear in collaboratively produced films, function as both research material and pedagogical practice within arts-based action research conducted with Indigenous youth in northern contexts. Drawing on media art workshops carried out at a Sámi upper secondary school in Utsjoki, Finland, and with students at Inussullivik in Narsaq, Greenland, the presentation centres on films created by the students and screened as part of the session. These films visually and narratively articulate young people’s future imaginaries in relation to land, ecocultures, and cultural continuity.

Rather than treating the films as artistic outcomes alone, the research approaches them as visual and narrative data through which learning processes, place-based relations, and youth perspectives become visible and open to analysis. The study is grounded in arts-based action research, which understands research as collaborative, situated, and practice-led. Knowledge production unfolds through artistic experimentation, embodied engagement, and reflexive dialogue with participants, emphasising learning through doing and iterative inquiry. Within this framework, future-oriented image-making is understood as a methodological tool that enables the articulation of values, hopes, and culturally embedded worldviews that may remain difficult to access through verbal or text-based methods alone.

Film screenings combined with short introduction was selected as the presentation format because they foreground the films themselves as research material and reflect the multimodal processes through which the future images were produced. In this sense, the films function both as empirical data and as a research outcome that is integral to the presentation of the study.This format enables audiences to engage directly with the visual representations of the future, while also reflecting on the methodological and pedagogical conditions shaping their creation and interpretation. By presenting the films as both empirical material and analytical entry points, the presentation contributes to research on arts education by demonstrating how artistic practice can function as a rigorous mode of inquiry into learning, ecocultures, and youth perspectives in Indigenous and Arctic educational contexts.

Arts-based action research forms the methodological framework. The study draws on collaborative media art workshops conducted with Indigenous youth in Utsjoki, Finland, and Narsaq, Greenland. Research material consists of student-produced films, the future-oriented images and narratives within them, researchers diary, and reflexive discussions surrounding their production and screening. The films function simultaneously as visual and narrative data and as research outputs, enabling analysis of pedagogical processes, place-based relations, and youth perspectives through artistic practice.

The presentation demonstrates that future-oriented image-making through film offers a powerful methodological approach for researching learning, ecocultures, and place-based relations in arts education. The findings indicate that collaboratively produced films make visible young people’s values, hopes, and culturally situated understandings of the future in ways that exceed text-based methods. Furthermore, positioning films as both research data and research outcomes enables a reflective and participatory mode of knowledge production, supporting arts-based action research as a context-sensitive approach within Indigenous and Arctic educational settings.

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