Luregn Lenggenhager Awarded SNSF Starting Grant: Curated Escapes and Derelict Landscapes in Times of Climate Change
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) funds excellent research at universities and other institutions – from chemistry to medicine to sociology. Researcher Luregn Lenggenhager currently resides at the Global South Studies Center (GSSC) with a Marie Skodolowskaja project that compares conservation across continents. He was recently awarded the highly prestigious SNSF Starting Grant, which will entail a 5 year non-tenured professorship at the University of Basel, starting in September 2025. His research project is titled „Curated Escapes and Derelict Landscapes in Times of Climate Change“. The research initiative „Sharing a Planet in Peril“ (SAPP) will continue the close collaboration with Luregn after his departure from the GSSC in 2025. You can find more info on Luregn’s new project below.
Click here for an interview with Luregn conducted by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) on his current research project (German / English Subtitles).
Curated Escapes and Derelict Landscapes in Times of Climate Change
2025-2031
PI: Luregn Lenggenhager
Dramatic ecological shifts not only give rise to „Derelict Landscapes“ where human life can barely subsist; they also lead to the creation of new landscapes—often envisioned and curated by powerful elites as exclusive „Curated Escapes“. This project explores derelict landscapes that are – rhetorically or effectively – at risk of becoming uninhabitable, alongside curated escapes offering elite refuge from climate catastrophe, framing them as part of a single process. Based on case studies from Namibia and South Africa, Sierra Leone, Antarctica, the Indian Ocean Territories, and Tuvalu the project investigates the long-standing political and ecological histories of both the creation and the curation of landscapes for elite escape, and explores how areas are rhetorically defined as inhospitable. This historicises curated escapes and the rhetoric of derelict landscapes, revealing how each is rooted in longstanding, racialised ideologies of settler colonialism, apartheid, and capitalist custodianship. Colonial aesthetics and imaginaries of nature shape contemporary manifestations and aspirations of elite escape, which were often made real through colonial and capitalist dispossessions. The project systematically investigates the relationships between curated escapes and derelict landscapes—in the context of past experiments, present endeavours, and future aspirations— and therefor aims at challenging established concepts of chronology, territory, and land rights in times of climate change.
