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Research partner in the new LEAD project “Global Pastures”

Foto: Johanna Platzgummer
A new research project on “Global pastures - ethnographic explorations of Alpine grassland connections” started on 1 January 2023.
The three-year research project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) as part of the so-called “LEAD agency procedure”, in which researchers in Switzerland work together with another partner country. The applicants and leaders of the project are Viviane Cretton (HES-SO Valais Valais) and Elisabeth Tauber (Free University of Bolzano). The University of Lausanne (Laine Chanteloup) and the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology (Roland Hardenberg) were selected as research partners for this project. A researcher from the Goethe University, Dr Almut Schneider (social and cultural anthropologist), works as a post-doctoral in this project. The investigation focusses on Swiss and northeast Italian semi-natural grasslands - a food resource for herded grazing cattle and sheep - and on those aspects of the international feeding industry and animal market that bear on species survival on these grasslands. Thus, this project deals with disparate, but connected fields and will provide insights concerning its two poles: the management of and practices on Alpine pastures and the far-reaching entanglements of global agrobusiness. Two field studies are planned, one in Switzerland (summer pastures in Graubünden), the other in South Tyrol (summer pastures in Val Senales, Tires al Catinaccio and Valle Arunda).