Research Funding
This page includes a listing of significant recent research funding.
Humboldt Research Award (2023-2025), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, Thom van Dooren
ARC Discovery Project (2024-2026), Robert Briggs, Matthew Chrulew, Dinesh Wadiwel, Thom van Dooren, Jacqueline Dalziell, and Dominique Lestel.
Living Together: New Approaches to Multispecies Conflict and Coexistence (DP240102689)
Building on the methods and concepts of the emerging environmental humanities, this project will produce a new conceptual vocabulary for a world in which multispecies conflict and coexistence is increasingly important. It brings critical and generative re-readings of classical political thought and contemporary biopolitical and cosmopolitical approaches into dialogue with a set of empirical case studies emerging from novel encounters between humans and other animals. This project will expand Australia’s knowledge base and research capacity in the interdisciplinary environmental humanities and stake out new approaches to the question of living together in a changing environment.
ARC Discovery Project (2022-2025), Thom van Dooren, Emily O’Gorman, Stephen Muecke, Grace Karskens, Matthew Kearnes, Natalie Osborne, Peter Minter
Narrative Ecologies of Warragamba Dam (DP220101258)
We are living in a period of significant environmental and land use challenges, many of them accompanied by conflicting understandings and values. This interdisciplinary environmental humanities project focuses on the proposed raising of the Warragamba Dam wall to explore the role of narrative in analysing and responding to socio-environmental controversies: narratives of connection to place, of livelihood and economic prosperity, of deep cultural relationships to Country. Ultimately, this project aims to develop new resources for enhancing community understanding and involvement in these complex issues, utilising narrative to enable responses that are creative, inclusive, and just.
Oslo School of Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (2021-2022), Sara Asu Schroer and Thom van Dooren
Worlds of Meaning in Conservation
This environmental humanities collaboratory aims to start cross-disciplinary conversations to understand, attend to and imagine how the overlapping worlds of meaning crafted by diverse humans and nonhumans may create new possibilities not just for survival, but for genuine multispecies coexistence and flourishing in the Sixth Extinction.
ARC Future Fellowship (2017-2021), Thom van Dooren
Extinction Stories: Inhabiting Landscapes of Loss in the Anthropocene (FT160100098)
We are living in the midst of a period of mass extinction. This multi-sited project aims to explore the cultural, political and ethical dimensions of biodiversity loss in three of the world’s ‘extinction capitals’. Through an innovative interdisciplinary approach that brings ethnographic research into dialogue with philosophy and the natural sciences, the project asks how the loss of species, and efforts to prevent these losses, shape the contours of local people’s lives and the landscapes they inhabit. This project also mobilises this research in a series of public-facing interventions that aim to cultivate community understanding of why and how extinctions matter, while developing resources for an engaged public environmental humanities.
ARC Discovery Project (2015-2017), Thom van Dooren
Encountering Crows: Living with wildlife in a changing world (DP150103232)
Ubiquitous in their global presence, crows are now found almost everywhere that people are: from critically endangered island crows living in disappearing forests to abundant urban species finding new ways to exploit changing cities. This multi-sited interdisciplinary project takes crows as guides into some of the many cultural and ethical issues that define human interactions with wildlife in this period of rapid environmental and social change. Drawing ethnographic research in a range of cultural contexts into dialogue with the literatures of philosophy and biology, this project will explore the role of an innovative environmental humanities approach in better understanding our place in, and obligations to, a changing world.
Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (2014-2016), Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, Thom van Dooren
Encountering crows: world-making with hunters and scientists in Germany
ARC Discovery Project (2011-2013), Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren
Encounters with Extinction: A multi-sited, multi-species approach to life at the edge of catastrophe in the Asia-Pacific region (DP110102886)
This project explores cultural dimensions of the mass extinction event now taking place globally. We take a multi-sited field research approach to investigate five biosocial contexts across the Asia-Pacific region, each focussing on a particular animal now sliding into extinction. We investigate people’s responses to and effects on extinction events in their local neighbourhood. Responding to calls from biological scientists for humanities scholars to develop research into the extinction crisis, we address two main questions: how are human communities entangled in current extinction events, and how are people imagining, articulating, and taking responsible and practical action concerning these catastrophes.