Living with Drought: Human -Environment Relationships in Drying European Landscapes

ongoing

Recent multi-year droughts have led to severe and unequally distributed socio-environmental disruptions across Europe, the Earth’s fastest warming continent. Much more than short-term ‘crisis-events’ droughts pose long-term, multi-faceted cultural, political, and conceptual challenges to society that remain poorly understood. Adopting a comparative, multi-sited anthropological approach, this project will generate needed insights into how people—farmers, conservationists, politicians, foresters, scientists—and local communities learn to live with drought in human-dominated landscapes in Spain, Germany, and Norway. Combining state-of-the-art theoretical approaches from such varied disciplines as anthropology, geosciences, and the environmental humanities, DROUGHT seeks to meet three specific objectives: 1) to produce a novel integrative cultural theory of drought as an inherently relational and situated socio-cultural and geophysical process that unfolds in and through human-dominated landscapes; 2) to complete the first historically informed, in-depth ethnography of living with drought in Europe; and 3) to experiment with collaborative, sensory and more-than-human research methods as a way to explore the affective, experiential, and material manifestations of drought. Fulfilling these objectives will enable DROUGHT to achieve its overarching aim: to generate an empirically-driven, theoretically ambitious field of scholarship—anthropogenic drought studies—that will advance knowledge of droughts in the social and cultural fields while adding needed empirical depth and nuance to emerging science-centred discourses on droughts in the Anthropocene. The knowledge produced will help transform academic, public, and political understanding of, and debates over, what constitutes droughts, why they matter, and how we should respond to them.