Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English en
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Planetary Anthropology and Interspecies Nurture: A Political Ontology of Human-Eel Relations.

Objective

PLANETARY EEL addresses the complex challenges to the reproduction of life on an increasingly damaged and unequal planet through the lens of human-eel relations. Anguillid eels have been of great nutritional, economic and cultural importance to humans on several continents for millennia. Yet eels have continued to resist domestication, and their reproductive cycle is still described by scientists as ‘enigmatic’ and ‘mysterious’: even today, their spawning in high seas has never been observed in the wild. The eel aquaculture industry, valued at over €4bn, depends on wild-caught juveniles, or ‘glass’ eels. Overfishing, illegal trafficking, habitat fragmentation, pollution and ocean warming, have caused over 90% declines in temperate species, and research to address this problem has largely been confined to the environmental and life sciences. PLANETARY EEL offers a radically new approach to study human-eel relations based on multimodal ethnographies of eel conservation, aquaculture, trade, and relational ontologies of nurture, consumption and kinship. Through an unconventional synergistic collaboration between anthropologists, multispecies designers, legal pluralism scholars, life scientists, and communities, the project will produce groundbreaking comparative accounts of human-eel relations, ranging from Indigenous cosmologies to the science and economics of industrial aquaculture, based on fieldwork in the Americas, Europe, East Asia and Oceania. Engaging eels as witnesses to offer a guiding thread through planetary multispecies relations, we will identify and document the political and ontological entanglements between global assemblages of the trade and consumption of eels, the materiality of eel mobility in freshwater systems and the oceans, and the different ways in which humans live with, feed, nurture and care for eels. Unlocking a new holistic paradigm, PLANETARY EEL will deliver a pioneering contribution to multispecies justice and planetary thinking.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

HORIZON-ERC-SYG - HORIZON ERC Synergy Grants

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) ERC-2025-SyG

See all projects funded under this call

Host institution

ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 5 927 873,00
Address
VIA ZAMBONI 33
40126 Bologna
Italy

See on map

Region
Nord-Est Emilia-Romagna Bologna
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 5 927 873,00

Beneficiaries (4)