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