I am currently a researcher holder of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Global Fellowships, Grant Agreement No. 101106065 entered into with the European Research Executive Agency - REA of the Europrea Commission under the Horizon 2020 Program for the project VAMP - Voices from the Anthropocene. Maps and Frameworks for Ecological Conflicts.
The VAMP project aims at a theoretical and operational rethinking of the ecological crisis from a semiotic perspective. While the current approach thinks of the ecological crisis as a crisis of nature, the hypothesis of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch marked by industrial activities, shows that we are dealing with a crisis of the very opposition between nature and culture, which does not adequately capture the intertwining of humans and nonhumans of which modern societies are composed. Privileged manifestations of this semantic inadequacy, ecological controversies appear as places where social groups "give voice" to nonhuman entities in order to shape society through a semiotic and political mechanism of representation.
The goal of VAMP is to provide a transferable protocol for addressing this mechanism by conceptualizing three main problems: deconstructing non-transformative rhetorics about the environment; exploring the potential for reorganizing human and non-human assemblages to dissolve socio-ecological tensions; and rethinking ecology as a form of relating to the technosphere, biosphere, and infosphere. The research focuses on two exemplary conflicts on how non-humans are given a voice in society: i) the battles for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest, recently exposed to further extractivist attacks by Bolsonaro's government; ii) and the struggle against the high-impact railway connecting Turin, Italy, and Lyon, France. The analysis protocol developed in relation to these cases will lay the theoretical and practical groundwork for developing a cartography of "forms of belonging" to environments and the social, technological and cultural values that constitute them.
