PhD Candidate, and post doctoral scientist: doctor Tanguy Sandré

Tanguy Sandré is a social scientist and critical ethnographer whose research explores how communities experience and make sense of environmental, climatic and sociopolitical upheavals. He holds a PhD in Social Sciences from Université Pris Saclay, with a European doctoral component at the University of Bergen. His research brings together critical approaches to adaptation and resilience, environmental justice, epistemic plurality and ethics.

Tanguy joined PREFER during his doctoral research, which he developed in parallel with the SeMPER-Arctic project. His priority field country was Kalaallit Nunaat, with Ittoqqortoormiit as his main field site. Through repeated ethnographic stays and extensive conversations with community members, he investigated how people experience and narrate the slow upheavals affecting their lives, including changing sea-ice conditions, hunting practices and wider social and environmental transformations. His doctoral thesis, defended in December 2024, developed a narrative-centred approach to these lived experiences, questioning resilience frameworks that can obscure what is locally meaningful and at stake.

After completing his PhD, Tanguy joined CEARC as a postdoctoral researcher and continued to contribute to PREFER, extending the work developed during his doctorate. His research has increasingly focused on critical environmental justice and epistemic injustice, including questions of whose knowledge is recognised in environmental governance and how scientific framings can marginalise local experiences and forms of knowledge. His work on narwhal management in Ittoqqortoormiit is one example of this broader concern.

Tanguy’s work also explores decolonial and transdisciplinary approaches to research, including collaborations involving film, narrative and other forms of knowledge production. Through PREFER, he has contributed to an approach that seeks to recentre lived experience and to understand terminal risks not simply as externally identified environmental threats, but through the meanings, ethical concerns and futures articulated by the people who experience them.