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SHL Digital co-director Professor Alice Eldridge worked with anthropologist Roger Norum at Oulu University (Finland) and five other leading European institutions to co-develop RURALEX: Knowledge in Crisis: The Dynamics of Environmental Expertise amidst Rural Change, an innovative investigation of the crisis of ecological knowledge in rural Europe. 

The project will develop deep mapping tools from multispecies perspectives to surface and articulate how knowledges in rural Europe are shifting, in order to better understand the implications for contemporary Social, cultural and ecological challenges. The team will develop and apply original research methods derived from anthropology, history, literary, cultural studies, sound studies and the environmental humanities, to advance inter-disciplinary debates on rural change and ecological justice; the project will generate comparable data for engendering positive change at the policy level. In so doing, RURALEX aims to demonstrate the importance of humanities approaches for studying urgent socio-ecological crises that are defining the future of many remote communities in Europe.  

Comprising a consortium of six research institutions and 11 associated partners across Europe, the project brings together a team of leading transdisciplinary European humanities scholars to study key cases in the Azores; the Pyrenees (Spain and France); the Alps (Italy and Bavaria); former East Germany; eastern Estonia; Romania and Bulgaria; the UK; and northern Finland.  

Professor Alice Eldridge will lead the UK team and will work with Rewilding Britain to innovate walking methods using micro-phenomenology with the aim of gaining insight into the tacit dimensions of environmental expertise and the felt dimensions of experience of rewilding landscapes. Opportunities for MA and Postdoctoral positions will be advertised in the coming months.  

By developing a means to carry out comparative analysis of deep, multispecies mapping, the team hopes to intervene in the policy space by developing methods that enable the articulation of tacit ecological knowledge and redress the absence of rural workers and knowledge holders in environmental decision making in Europe.  

RURALEX has been funded by HERA under the 2024 call Crisis, Perspectives from Humanities.  

The project will start in spring 2025 and run for 36 months.