Chloé Vanden Berghe
PhD Student
Chloé Vanden Berghe is a PhD student in Social Sciences at the ULB, supported by the FNRS. She holds a double Master's degree in French and Romance Languages and Literatures and in Environmental Science and Management. Her research focuses on the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) in the Brussels-Capital Region (BCR). Her methodology lies at the crossroads of ethology and ethnography and is based on observing animals in the places where they live ("beastly places") and in the social imagination. The aim of the thesis entitled 'The city and the den: political and social stories of foxes in Brussels' is to document the sociality of foxes, both intraspecific (between conspecifics) and interspecific (with humans and domestic animals). The aim is to deepen our knowledge of foxes through the interdisciplinary use of social and natural sciences, and to sketch out shared worlds, especially when these overlap with large urban centers, in order to put into perspective the relationships that our Western societies have with living worlds. Putting animal biographies (or the biographies of groups of animals) into narrative form, and testing a new regime of attention, provides access to subtle understandings of what matters to other living beings.
