SEDA Conference 2026
Common Ground
Draft - Subject to change
Line-Ups
Day 1 - Friday
Speakers
Niamh MacKenzie - Intangible Culture of Drystange Dyking
Niamh is a PhD candidate with the University of the Highlands and Islands, in collaboration with Historic Environment Scotland and funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. Her research focuses on drystane dyking (dry stone walling) as a traditional craft and an evolving example of intangible cultural heritage. Her fieldwork has taken her to communities across the country to meet and work alongside craftspeople. Her interest in Scotland's living heritage spans across performance and music, as well as traditional practices and craft.
Dr Ryan Dziadowiec - Speaker and Artist - Dùthchas
Ryan is a researcher and educator based in Inverness. His research centres around the confluence of people, place and language. In 2024 he completed a thesis investigating the Gaelic concept dùthchas, after which he worked on a community landownership archiving project with Community Land Scotland.
Workshops
Earth Building with Becky Little
Becky Little is an artist/builder and teacher working with natural materials, communities and place. With over 30 years of experience across construction, conservation and art, she specialises in building with earth, working directly with soils and fibre.
Through making, she explores how ecological relationships, material agency and heritage become visible and tactile, forming narratives within the work itself. She moves between building, sculpture and public engagement, bringing practical skills together with shared enquiry and learning.
Her current work develops more reciprocal approaches to construction, shifting away from extractive models towards ways of building that respond to land, materials and more-than-human worlds. Through workshops and collaborative projects, she invites others to work directly with earth as a living material, and to understand building as a relationship with the ground beneath us.
Drystane Dyking
Prefiguritive Practice Workshop with Scott McAulay - Evening
Scott McAulay
Day 2 - Saturday
Speakers
Tim Ingold - How tradition was turned into heritage, and how to turn it back
Tim is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.
Common Ground Talks & Panel
Chaired by Arno Verhoeven
Dr Freya Wise is an ESRC Research Fellow at the University of the West of England, in the Centre for Advanced Built Environment Research (CABER). Freya’s interdisciplinary research focusses on carbon reduction from existing buildings including both people’s views, values and behaviours as well as more technical issues such as building performance and whole life carbon. Freya’s PhD focussed on carbon reduction from vernacular buildings and Freya has subsequently worked on informational barriers to retrofit, energy modelling and heat pump uptake. Freya has worked with organisations and policy makers in the UK and produced and informed retrofit guidance and standards.
Garry Olson (Onetree Project) has had 40 years experience as a designer and maker of fine furniture. He is now mostly retired and devotes much of his time to encouraging sustainability at a local level. In 1998 he teamed up with colleague Peter Toaig to manage the "onetree" project. The main aims were to promote British timber as a valuable resource and to exhibit it as a beautiful and versatile material. In doing so it also showcased British artists, designers and makers. It spawned many follow-up projects around the world.
Shravya Dayaneni is a design-led innovation researcher, strategist, and the former Magazine Editor for the Scottish Ecological Design Association (SEDA). Building on her past work with food systems and behaviours, she is currently a student researcher at the Glasgow School of Art. Her research investigates the intersection of urban food-growing, policy governance, and relational intelligence(s). Through keen observation and critical analysis, Shravya seeks to understand the deeply rooted frictions in how institutions administratively categorise and approach living land. By unpacking these systemic bottlenecks, she advocates for a "vocabulary of care" to drive meaningful change and bridge the gap between civic ledgers and grassroots ecological realities. Deeply informed by natural systems, her practice aligns the design of nature closer to our current civic structures. Whether analysing urban food policies and concepts, cultivating bio-active scapes, or practising holistic care for her family, she applies principles of biomimicry to challenge existing flows of values, economies, and behaviours. Ultimately, her work reframes human wellbeing not as an isolated, individual pursuit, but as a deeply integrated part of a broader, deep ecology.
Mairi Ferris (Thrive Outdoors)
Workshops
Regenerative Storytelling with Allison Galbraith
Photo credit Elaine Livingstone
Allison Galbraith is a folklorist and professional storyteller with over thirty years of experience creating community projects in Scotland. She has written traditional oral folktale collections, including Funny Folktales for Children (2023), Lanarkshire Folktales (2021), and Dancing With Trees: Eco-Tales from the British Isles (co-author, 2017), all published by The History Press. She is a member of the Scottish Storytelling Forum and the Folklore Society, regularly contributing as a storyteller and workshop facilitator to festivals and conferences.
Women with Caroline Walker (speaker), Kirsty Glichrist and Lindsey Henderson (facilitators)
Caroline Walker -
Kirsty Gilchrist helps people and organisations be brave.
Through facilitation, strategy and mentoring, Kirsty works with individuals and teams to reconnect with their drive, find their voice ,and move forward with clarity and confidence to be the brave they want to be.
She has also founded The Brave Collective, a growing network of experienced professionals who are challenging the status quo, finding their purpose and their voice to change the trajectory of their life.
Kirsty believes that sustainable change comes from challenging the status quo strategically through being completely authentic - genuine enough to stay energised, wise enough to build alliances, brave enough to take action.
Soloco | Kirsty Gilchrist | The Brave Collective
Lindsey Henderson
Circularity with Tom Morton
Tom Morton
Hutting with Hutters of Falkland Estate with Arno Verhoeven and the Falkland hutters
Arvo Verhoeven
Council of All Beings with Adele Clarke
Adele Clarke
Artistic Contributions
Chisom Okoronkwo is a Nigerian-Scottish writer and spoken word artist. She holds a First Class degree in English Language and Literature and is the recipient of the 2024 African Excellence Award from the University of Glasgow, where she earned an MLitt in Creative Writing (Distinction). Her work has appeared in Brittle Paper, Isele Magazine, Ake Review, Blue Marble Review, and Lunar Journal, among others. She is the winner of the 2023 Shuzia Journey of the Soul Poetry Contest, and has been shortlisted for the Isele Short Story Prize and the Glasgow Women’s Library Bold Types Competition, as well as longlisted for the Bournemouth Writing Prize and The Writers’ Prize.
She has performed at the Acid Cabaret Show (2025), Edinburgh International Poetry Festival (2026), University of Glasgow Creative Writing Festival (2026), and Creative of Colours Festival (2026). She is a current member of Glasgow City of Poets.
Day 3 - Sunday
Speakers
Gabrielle Clarke - Conservation strategy and crop landraces
Gabby is a PhD researcher from the University of Birmingham and will be sharing her work on crop landrace conservation in Great Britian. Landraces are crop varieties that are maintained through the practice of saving seed on farms or in gardens, meaning that over time they become locally adapted and are much more genetically diverse than modern varieties developed through formal crop breeding. They are vitally important in building climate resilience in farming systems, yet they are incredibly threatened. Throughout her research, Gabby has been travelling around the country to speak with those growing landraces and hearing their stories to better understand the major challenges of growing landraces and how we can improve their conservation to ensure they remain in cultivation as a crucial genetic and cultural resource to be enjoyed by future generations to come.
Andrew Whitley - 1o years of Bread for Good Community Benefit Society
Andrew is director of Bread Matters Ltd and a leader of the artisan baking revival, having founded the organic Village Bakery in the 1970s. He is author of the seminal Bread Matters and the best-selling DO Sourdough.
He has an MSc in Food Policy from City University London and is credited with ‘changing the way we think about bread’ (BBC Food & Farming Awards).
He co-founded the Real Bread Campaign and is a former vice-chair of the Soil Association. He co-founded the Bread For Good Community Benefit Society, which trades as Scotland The Bread, with his late wife Veronica Burke in 2012.
Food Networks Panel
After spending more than 20 years in academic research, Dr Marian Bruce founded Highland Boundary, Scotland’s first wild distillery in 2016, where she is director and distiller. Award-winning Highland Boundary spirits and non-alcoholic drinks are produced on her small, rewilded family farm at Kirklandbank in Alyth, Perthshire where she also manages livestock, a holiday rental and sculpture businesses. She was Enterprise Manager for Affric Highlands from 2022-2024 and is a member of the Scottish Nature Finance Pioneers Group. As a biologist specialising in biodiversity, Marian’s understanding of the need to work with nature rather than against it is fundamental to her regenerative way of thinking. Marian currently leads on Bioregioning Tayside’s landscape restoration work.
Janice Foster is a Chartered Building Services Engineer and researcher specialising in Building Performance Evaluation and health and wellbeing at MEARU, Glasgow School of Art. She contributed to monitoring the indoor environmental quality of four areas of this home and will share the key insights on air temperature and relative humidity
Her recent publications explore energy efficiency and ergonomics in kitchen environments in social housing and highlight ways that design can impact user experience and create unintended inequalities. Her research findings are disseminated in academic journals and conferences, where insights on energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality, and occupant experience are presented using real-life examples. Janice actively engages in knowledge transfer between industry and academia and draws on her research, engineering and sustainability experience to inspire students at the Glasgow School of Art.
Having spent over 20 years in the technology sector working for various USA based software firms, Mike Cottam and wife Catherine decided on a complete lifestyle change and move to the Scottish Highlands, fuelled by a life-long love of hills, forest, country sports and deer.
Twenty-three years later and time spent working in fishery management, developing Wild Deer Best Practice for NatureScot and Land Management for Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA), Mike is now intimately involved with land management communities in the wider Grampian area.
Besides working full-time for CNPA Mike is involved as an officer of four Deer Management Groups in CNP, providing a detailed insight into both public and private land management issues.
Most recently, through CNPA's Cairngorms2030 programme and with funding from National Lottery Heritage Fund, he has been able to facilitate the local processing of wild, red deer venison initially to address serious agricultural damage from deer incursion but also to provide local community benefit by donating venison for foodbanks, community kitchens and schools. Two deer processing units (larders) completed the first year of operation (January 2025 to January 2026) and donated some 3,000 kg for community benefit. Two further units are funded and in the procurement phase, giving a total potential donation of over 5,500 kg pa of wild venison for local communities in-need and Scotland's future vested in its young people.