Senior scientist: Associate professor Anne-Laure Legendre

Anne-Laure Legendre is an urban planner and social scientist at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and a member of CEARC. Her research explores how people experience and make sense of the places they inhabit, with particular attention to well-being, vulnerability, justice and recognition. Her work starts from lived experience rather than from externally defined categories of what makes a place healthy, sustainable or desirable, and examines what this perspective changes for research, public policy and collective action.

Within PREFER, Anne-Laure’s priority field country is Colombia, with Tenjo as her priority field site. She contributes an experience-based and ethnographic perspective to the project’s investigation of local terminal risks, paying particular attention to relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. Her work asks how situations of profound change are experienced and interpreted when the boundaries between social, environmental and non-human concerns are not taken for granted.

Her research has progressively opened from environmental health and urban planning towards broader questions of how humans relate to their living environments and to other forms of life. This includes a recent engagement with human–animal relations, examining how animals become visible - or remain absent - in our ways of thinking, speaking and organising society. She has contributed to CEARC’s work on animal ethics and on the relations between humans and other animals, including through research and creative approaches that question representations and relations of domination.

Anne-Laure’s approach is grounded in ethnographic and participatory research and in a strong interest in the epistemological and ethical implications of taking people’s experiences seriously. She is also interested in the interfaces between research, public policy and collective learning. Through PREFER, she brings these concerns into a broader exploration of what is at stake when ways of living and relating to the world are profoundly unsettled, including the possibility of understanding terminal situations beyond an exclusively human perspective.