Biography
Alix Levain is a CNRS Research Fellow in anthropology. Her research focuses on the lived experience of contemporary ecological transformations, the politics of knowledge, and the emotions associated with ecosystem degradation. Grounded in a public anthropology perspective, her work examines changes in coastal environments through a historical and comparative analysis of the emergence of issues related to algal blooms and aquatic pollution.
She completed her PhD in 2014, with a dissertation on the lived experience of green tides in Brittany. Since 2019, Alix Levain has been involved in a large-scale collaborative research project on the Yellow Vests movement and the Citizens' Notebooks (cahiers citoyens) (coordinated by M. Della Sudda), leading the strand dedicated to participants’ relationships with environmental issues.
Her work has been published in Techniques & Culture, Environment & Society, Nature Sciences Sociétés, Environmental Sociology, Land Use Policy, and Science of the Total Environment. More recently, she co-edited Elusive Partners: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives on Marine Species (Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, 2023) and Des vies avec des plages: expériences, relations, devenirs (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024).
Research Project
Living Conditions and the Conditions for Life. Popular Understandings and Appropriations of Planetary Boundaries in a Growing Metropolitan Area
This project builds on a collaborative study of, and around, the cahiers de doléances (citizens' grievance notebooks) of Nantes Métropole to examine the relationships between material living conditions, ecological sensibilities, and civic engagement in shaping the city’s future. Collected in 2018 and 2019, these notebooks constitute a unique source for understanding ongoing socio-ecological transformations. They are closely tied to democratic concerns, and the citizens who contributed to them made full use of the freedom of expression that this format afforded.
Within this context, the project aims to:
- explore, from the ground up, how living conditions and ecological cultures intersect, highlighting socially situated pathways towards ecological engagement rooted in lived experiences of inhabiting places;
- investigate, from a public anthropology perspective, the emotions and regimes of sensibility associated with the experience of planetary boundaries, focusing on attachments and the processes of political subject formation they engender;
- experiment with spaces for collaborative interpretation based on residents’ spoken and written accounts, while conveying the richness and complexity of these lived experiences.
