Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities

Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities

What and how can we learn from animals about recovering from disasters? How can we hear them in their own terms, translate their stories, and include their perspectives, in human knowledge about disasters? This project explores the resilience of multispecies communities, and their capacities for healing and bouncing back from disasters, through the point of view of nonhuman animals. It departs from the current context of acute climate crisis, which sets the stage for Dantesque scenarios of impending climate-driven disasters such as wildfires, floods, tornados and hurricanes, with related extensive loss of both human and nonhuman lives, liveable dwellings and species extinction. Focusing on wildfires as disasters that challenge previous expert knowledge due to climate change and human exploitation of natural resources, we propose to compare three countries where wildfires have taken on increasingly critical proportions every year: Brazil, Australia and Portugal. We address a species gap in our knowledge of disasters, and wildfires in particular, by exploring the possibilities of learning with animals how to live and cope with extreme change and uncertainty in wildfire-prone areas. Drawing on contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists, biologists and geographers, ABIDE aims at attuning to, translating and including the voices, stories and experiences of animals into our knowledge of how multispecies communities can better recover from the traumatic experience of wildfires. In the end, we seek to build the foundations for a new interdisciplinary framework for addressing humans' and animals' ability to build and abide in multispecies communities that are more resilient to wildfires and other disasters. In so doing, we aspire to identify the landmarks of a post-species episteme, and thus push forward the frontiers of knowledge of human-animal relations, as well as contribute to a more-than-human governance of disasters.

Estatuto: 
Entidade proponente
Financiado: 
Sim
Entidades: 
European Research Council Executive Agency
Keywords: 

Human-animal relations, multispecies relations, nonhuman animals, multispecies ethnography, multispecies methodologies, disasters, wildfires, climate change, global environmental crisis, biodiversity, disaster trauma, disaster resilience, disaster recovery, disaster governance

Observações: 
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101043231
Parceria: 
Não Integrado

ABIDE

Coordenador ICS 
Referência externa 
ERC-2021-COG -GA101043231
Data Inicio: 
01/05/2023
Data Fim: 
30/04/2028
Duração: 
60 meses
Em curso