Ivo Van Puyvelde

Enlivening our Environments

My current research project seeks to study the ontologies of the environment incarnated in regenerative farmers and foresters. By joining the practices and closely attending to the work of those engaging most intimately with-in our living environments, I seek to track the environments which guide and give meaning to human behaviour in ways contestant of the ontology underlying conventional environmental law. The objective is to identify cartographies which, in the face of the ongoing erosion of life on Earth, could inspire alternative legal regimes governing human behaviour where it touches the folds of the Earth – with a particular focus on agriculture and forestry. Drawing on the social scientific approaches of multispecies ethnography, more-than-human anthropology, new materialism, and correspondence thinking, I seek to bring legal theory into dialogue with analytical frameworks that render perceptible the worldmaking projects of countless critters in correspondence with which we necessarily build our societies. 

Supervisors - Dr Saskia Vermeylen, Dr Antonio Cardesa-Salzmann and Dr Christine Frison

Email - ivo.van-puyvelde@strath.ac.uk