Grants and residencies

Research and art

The Big Layered Cake: towards the conceptualization of neighborness

Application summary

The proposed project is a continuation and development of the ongoing project "The layered cake of neighborness", which is being implemented by the team of Russian and Finnish scientists with the support of the Kone Foundation. Based on the gained research experience, and extending it, we propose the elaboration and implementation of a research and educational program with the goal to assemble and shape the studies of neighborness as a distinct interdisciplinary research field of social sciences, tailored for the joint work with artists and broader publics. The program will be developed along three major lines: 1) research: the сontinuation of work in the ‘old’ project themes and expansion of ongoing research by a new research project ‘Primus inter pares’: multispecies neighboring in Russia and Finland; 2) education: the elaboration and implementation of a number of education activities, academic and public (‘neighborness course’ for Russian and Finnish participants, online academic course, short online entries); 3) public dissemination: the translation of the gained results to non-academic languages (ex., art) and making them accessible to broader audiences (exhibition, theater performance, ‘neighborness encyclopedia’ project). The project targets to the assembling of the field of neighborness studies as a crossroads of social sciences, art, and education and in this endeavor will rely upon qualitative methodologies.

Based on the results of the study of the neighborhood of people, this project sees neighbourness as a conscious, rationalized activity based on certain rules of social interactions. The inclusion of non-humans in our research optics allows enriching the concept of “the art of neighboring” with an important segment of relations with other species; we presume that not only humans, but animals, insects and viruses participate in building these relations at various levels: from the corporeality of the individual to international relations. New research extends our understanding of neighbourness and neighborhood from the human community to the multispecies community. “Primus inter pares” refers to the idea of Gilles Deleuze about the equity of living species and yet captures our optics as sociologists and social anthropologists, prioritizing a human being as the main actor in this diverse community of neighbors. From the broadened perspective of neighboring, the idea about unfulfilled division between nature and society, which also belongs to Latour (1993), appears really significant. In our studies we proceed from that part of the ANT that understands species "not just humanlike subjects or things like objects, but actors of a different order" (Martin, Mattugh, 2014:5).

In the empirical part of our research we considered policies, norms, values, rules, and practices of coexistence of people and their non-human neighbors in the "culture" and "nature" spaces of Russia and Finland. The research was conducted with a diversity of methods: qualitative in-depth interview, observation, diary method, sensitive approach, relational approach, reflexive documentary, multispecies ethnography, ethno-ecology, anthropology beyond humanity, more-than-human geography, and others. Doing our research, we thought of non-humans not only as mediators in human relations or as objects of relevant policies, but also as neighbors proper, interaction with which largely formats our life.

We started this project in January 2019, and by the end of 2019, the problem of coexistence of people and other living beings on the planet, without exaggeration, became a central topic on global agenda. The COVID-19 pandemic is reflected in our new subproject — a study of the diaries of everyday life of Petersburgers and Muscovites on the topics "neighborhood on the quarantine" and "in neighbourship with the virus". The results of the project are diverse and rich in potential for development. They embrace public discussion of new research and approaches, relevant to investigation of human and nonhuman neighboring, unique empirical collections, public presentations of research results, publications, international conference combining the social science-and-artistic parts, encyclopedia of neighboring, and art-projects inspiration.

Back to Grants listing