Doing Rewilding: Following Conservation Biologists through Multispecies Resurgence
The PhD project engages ethnographically with the production of knowledge about transboundary nature protection and rewilding in times of climate change and increasing biodiversity loss. Central to this knowledge production are institutions that scientifically engage with the conservation, abundance and resettlement of species. By assembling selected cases about transboundary conservation, the project develops a practice-based approach to how rewilded and resurgent natures are enacted by conservation biologists situated in a Czech-German context. A special focus is put on the role of historical events such as natural disasters and anthropogenic disturbances that have shaped the area of investigation. Taking such historical events into account allows to highlight the relevance of and relation between human and nonhuman agency in dynamic ecological processes. The project seeks to contribute to the body of empirical sociological research that explicitly includes nonhuman agency for a more response-able conceptualisation of “sociality” in times of ecological crisis.