The Academy of Finland’s Research Council for Culture and Society granted nearly 30 million euros in funding for 59 new Academy Projects. Academy Project funding is granted for four years.
The WIRE-project led by research professor Florian Stammler from the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland is one of the funded projects. Stammler is the leader of the Arctic Anthropology research group. The funded project concentrates on human-animal relations.
The research aims to revise our understanding of human-animal relations. Project team will study the diversity of ways in which people perceive the domesticity, wildness, hybridity and ferality of northern animals, which are fundamental to local cultures in our case sites in Finland and Russia.
The project team will re-think human-animal sustainability through ethnographic documentation (anthropology), analysis of past human-animal partnerships (history), gene expressions (genetics), and comparative analysis of norms (law).
Perspectivist approaches will be used for showing that the reality of 'what is an animal' is not static but depends on the standpoint. With participatory research, we shall integrate these perspectives to contribute to theoretical renewal in the field of human-animal sustainability, advance perspectivism as a theoretical direction in interdisciplinary research, and raise awareness in society of the diversity of understandings of domestic and wild animals in our environment.
– I am extremely happy that we were able to receive funding also to our university and the Arctic Centre and at the same time strengthen the future of our Arctic anthropology team, Stammler says.
Funding was also granted to one project in the Faculty of Law of the University of Lapland.
More information:
Research professor Florian Stammler
Arctic Centre, University of Lapland
florian.stammler(at)ulapland.fi
+358 400 138 807
Press release of the Academy of Finland 26.5.2021: Academy of Finland announces new Academy Projects in social sciences and humanities