Farms on the move. Rethinking the geographies of transhumance’s community-based economies: a more-than-human approach.

The project offers an innovative, less anthropocentric understanding of transhumance, understood as a pillar of rural economies in remote regions. It aims to contribute to advancing knowledge on human-animal relations in agriculture and theorizations of the economy from a more-than-human perspective. Transhumance is husbandry method based on the seasonal movement of livestock, which is overlooked in contemporary international geography, as most studies focus on factory farming or alternative food networks. Despite having long been set aside in policymaking and in international geographical debates, transhumance is re-emerging as politically relevant as various stakeholders work to valorise it as a multifunctional, agroecological venture. Adopting a more-than-human approach inspired by translocal assemblage theory, the project posits transhumance as partaking in the diverse economy, understood as made of economic practices which do not exist in isolation from capitalism but which try to avoid practices of exploitation and foster relationships of care, mutuality and obligation. Transhumance is here also explored as a context where to produce novel knowledge on complex human-animal relations enabled by the possibility of animals to move across the landscape, rather than being confined within the intensive farm. Three main research questions guide this project 1) How do the places and practices of contemporary transhumance affect the lives of humans and animals? 2) What are human-animal relations in transhumance from the animals’ perspectives? 3) How do these specific human-animal relations foster transhumance’s diverse eco nomies? To whom and to what do these relations stretch? To investigate how specific human-animal relationships are at the core of transhumance and how these partake in the diverse economy the project adopts a multispecies ethnographic approach that combines traditional and innovative qualitative methods, including desk research and digital ethnography, in-depth interviews, participant observation based on kinaesthetic empathy and supported by visual and body mapping methods. This approach is applied to two case studies where transhumance is notably and widely practiced: Piedmont (North-West Italy) and Abruzzo (Central Italy). The choice of the case studies allows to investigate two very different types of this husbandry practice: Alpine vertical transhumance and horizontal transhumance in the Apennines.