PREFER in a nutshell

What happens when people are confronted with the possibility that the world they know and value may no longer be?
This is the starting point of PREFER, an ERC-funded research project exploring how people and communities experience and respond to situations that they perceive as potentially terminal - situations in which something that matters deeply to them may disappear, be irreversibly transformed, or cease to be possible.

We often talk about existential risks in terms of their global scale: climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, nuclear war, or technological risks. PREFER approaches the question from another direction. It begins with particular places, particular communities and particular lives, and asks what existential risk looks like when experienced from the ground.
The project uses the idea of Local Terminal Risk (LTRisk) to explore situations in which the future, the continuity, of a community, a place, a relationship, a way of life or a set of values comes into question. What makes such situations especially revealing is that they are not simply moments of material loss. They are also moments in which people have to make difficult judgements: What matters most? What can be given up? What must be defended? What do we owe to others? And what kind of future is still worth pursuing?
PREFER seeks answers to these questions through long-term, place-based research. Fieldwork has taken us to Vietnam, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland’s endonym) and Colombia, among other places, and has involved interviews, life stories, ethnographic observation and walking alongside people as they experience and interpret profound changes in their surroundings and circumstances.
But the project is not only interested in what researchers can observe. It is equally concerned with how people themselves name, interpret and give meaning to what is happening. This means paying attention to forms of knowledge and judgement that can easily be overlooked by conventional approaches to risk: relationships, obligations, memories, values, emotions, cultural practices and ideas about what is right or worthwhile.
One of the concepts emerging from this work is that of moral grammars. These are the principles, values and forms of ethical action through which people organise what matters and make judgements when circumstances become difficult. They are not universal rules waiting to be discovered. They are rooted in particular histories, relationships and ways of living together.
This also raises a question about research itself. Who has the authority to say that something is coming to an end? Who gets to describe what is being lost? And whose understanding of what matters is allowed to shape the response? PREFER therefore experiments with forms of collaboration involving local artists, filmmakers and storytellers, seeking not simply to document people’s experiences but to create spaces in which they can speak and represent them on their own terms.
PREFER does not aim to produce a universal theory of existential risk, or to predict which communities or ways of life will disappear. Instead, it asks what we can learn by taking seriously the judgements of people who are already living through situations in which the future has become uncertain.
At its heart, PREFER is about what people do when something they deeply value is at risk of no longer being - and what this can teach us about risk, values, responsibility and the possibilities of collective action.

PREFER (Local Terminal Risk as a Proxy for Existential Risk) is funded by the European Research Council through an ERC Advanced Grant awarded under the ERC-2021-ADG call (Grant Agreement No. 101055305). The project is hosted by Université de Versailles Saint Quentin en Yveleines (part of the Paris Saclay collective) and conducted within the CEARC research centre.