Giovanna Capponi (Nov 2025 - Feb 2026)
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology, State University of Rio de Janeiro
My research
I am an anthropologist with a specific focus on environmental anthropology and more-than-human studies. I am currently working on the collaborative epistemologies of scientific, social, and religious understandings of the environmental crises in the context of Afro-Brazilian religions, on more-than-human materiality in museums, and on urban fauna in different contexts, such as feral cats in Rome and whales in Rio de Janeiro.
IAS Fellowship
What can animals tell us about human social worlds through their specific biological characteristics and interactions with urban built environments? How can anthropologists and sociologists move beyond understanding animals through the lens of discourse to collaborate with colleagues in other disciplines, such as urban planners, architects, biologists, engineers, ecologists, and artists, to grasp the complex entanglements of more-than-human worlds? Can these disciplines contribute different methodologies to help answer questions and issues in ways that extend and enrich multispecies ethnography? This project aims to develop interdisciplinary methodologies for researching human-animal relations in urban environments, connecting increasingly popular social science and humanities methods often glossed as “multispecies ethnography” to natural science methods from ecology and ethology, and to design methods such as those mobilised by urban planners or architects.