Voices from the Anthropocene. Maps and Frameworks for Ecological Conflicts

The aim of the project is to develop an innovative framework for a better understanding of ecological crisis. The current approach is based on the idea that we are going through a global crisis of nature.

However, the Anthropocene hypothesis, a geological epoch marked by industrial activities, shows that what we are facing is not a crisis of ""natural entities"", but a crisis of the concept of nature.

Accounting for this semantic instability in ecological controversies allows us to see conflicts of representations where different social groups ""give voice"" to non-human entities.

Our aim is to provide a transferable protocol to deal with that, consisting in i) deconstructing non-transformative rhetoric on environment; ii) rearrange human and non-human assemblages in sustainable ways; iii) rethinking ""environment"" as the effect of a ployphony resonating simoultanously in the technosphere, the biosphere and the infosphere.

To that end, our approach intertwines political ecology, anthropology of nature, Science and Technology Studies and eco-feminism in a semiotic oriented theory of enunciation.

This approach will be tested through two crucial cases of ""voice giving"" to non-humans: i) the battles for the conservation of Amazonian Forest, recently exposed to further extractivist attacks by Bolsonaro's Government; ii) and the struggle against high impact railroad linking Turin, in Italy, and Lyon, in France.

Our transferable protocol, taking into account gender, social and cultural differences that ecological controversies manifest, will provide a comprehensive cartography of ""forms of belonging"".

That reshape entirely the theoretical space of politics, making room for a better representation of ecological redirection challenges. The methodological tools for this are those of semiotics of culture and ethnography.

We will put them to use for a comparative study on how non-humans are given a voice by political, mediatic, scientific, grassroots and administrative discourse.