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WASS Open Round grant for Eugenie van Heijgen

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December 15, 2015

For the third time in a row a PhD student of the Cultural Geography Group is awarded with a grant by the Wageningen School for Social Sciences (WASS).

The PhD project proposal ‘Hunting landscapes: a situated multispecies approach to the past, present and future of hunting in the Netherlands’, will be carried out by Eugenie van Heijgen and is jointly supervised by Clemens Driessen (Cultural Geography Group) and Esther Turnhout (Forest and Nature Policy Group). The project was selected out of 22 applications, out of which 4 have been granted.

What is the PhD Project on Hunting Landscapes about?

In Dutch society, hunting has become a disputed activity. Recurrent debates focus on the morality of killing animals, raising questions about the future place of hunting. Legitimations of hunting have broadened from ‘wildlife management’ towards narratives that emphasize hunting as the ultimate free-range meat production. This reveals how hunting is a dynamic practice, the meanings of which change in relation to shifting societal views on food, landscape, animals and nature. In these hunting practices, new human-nature relationships and social orders –including conceptions of human/-non-human, wild/-domesticated and nature/-culture–are constantly negotiated. Many of today’s nature areas –their physical lay-out and resident wildlife populations– find their origin in hunting. Thus, hunting shapes the environment by constituting hunting landscapes.
This research uses three contrasting hunting landscapes to analyse the various meanings of hunting, the way these resonate with changing human nature relationships and social orders, and the landscapes in which they take place and which they help shape. Using an innovative combination of methods from history, cultural geography, discourse analysis and multi-species ethnography, the research offers new perspectives on the past, present and future of Dutch hunting landscapes.