October 2022 blog post: PREFER is starting!

This October 2022, PREFER is just beginning.

There are no results to present yet, no fieldwork to report, no stories to tell. There is the ERC proposal, several years of thinking, writing and imagining what the project might become, and a list of potential field sites scattered across very different parts of the world. There is also a newly assembled team, with all the excitement and uncertainty that comes with the beginning of a large research project.

We decide that our kick-off meeting should not take place in a meeting room, well not in our usual meeting room!

Instead, we gather for a retreat in the Cotentin, in Normandy, on a farm accustomed to hosting groups and giving them the space to think together. For a few days, we step away from our usual institutional routines to ask what PREFER might actually become, to focus on making it happen.

At this point, the map is still largely hypothetical. Greenland, Vietnam, Colombia and other possible places appear as names on a screen. The concepts are there; the questions are there; but none of us yet knows quite what the research will reveal.

We are already talking about the importance of listening to people whose worlds and ways of valuing things may differ from those assumed by conventional approaches to risk.

Photo galery available here.

More later!