Animal ABidings: recoverIng from DisastErs in more-than-human communities
ABIDE is a research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) through a Consolidator Grant (ID 101043231). We ask what we can learn from animals about how to recover from disasters, in particular catastrophic wildfires. ABIDE aspires of reimagining ways of paying attention to other animals’ experiences of disasters, and then translate their stories in order to include their perspectives in human modes of knowing and governing disasters.
Drawing on contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists, biologists and geographers, ABIDE aims at attuning to, translating and including the perspectives, experiences and stories 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.
ABIDE is hosted at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal, within the Human-Animal Studies Hub. It kicked off officially in 2023 and will unfold until 2028.
PROJECT
Focusing on wildfires as disasters which 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: Australia, Brazil, 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.
