SIS Networking Scheme Talk: Goat Herding in the Aspromonte, An Environmental Humanities Approach to Questions of Modernity and Backwardness

13 Nov 2025

Join us for a fascinating exploration of Calabria’s cultural landscapes and environmental challenges. As part of the SIS Networking Scheme, Dr Aurora Moxon (University College Cork) will be presenting her research at Edinburgh with the support of the Society. You can attend the talk in Edinburgh or Online, Thursday 20 November 1:30-3pm (UK time).

For those able to join us in person, the talk will take place at: 50 George Square, Project Room, Edinburgh EH8 9LH.

For those who prefer to join online, here is the Teams link:

The session will be recorded, so if the date and time don’t suit, you’ll still be able to catch up later. 

About the Talk

Aligned with tropes of ‘backwardness’ associated with Calabria, this talk explores how the practices of goat-herders in the Aspromonte mountains challenge Western understandings of ‘modernity’. Agropastoral ways of life risk being lost as inhabitants of inland communities move down to urban developments along the coast, to Italy’s centre and north, and overseas. 

Drawing on ethnographic research in the region, Dr Moxon considers the significance of herders who choose to stay, to return, as well as those who have settled without prior connections in the Aspromonte. She examines contrasting relationships with these mountains and how approaches to goat-herding challenge tropes of immobility and stasis typically associated with the Aspromonte. While goat-herding is often aligned with immobility, herding relies on adaptability to environmental phenomena and intricate mobilities between humans and nonhumans, including herding dogs. 

Questions of cultural maintenance and hybridity are central to this research. Through an analysis of the complex and fluid relationships between herders, their herds, and their various mobilities, this work reconceptualises the Aspromonte as a space of cultural renewal and resistance in the face of emigration and environmental change. 

About the Speaker

Aurora Moxon is a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork, researching food, farming, and cultural renewal in the Aspromonte mountains, Italy. Her current project, Mountain Mobilities: ‘Modernity’, Mobility and Renewal in the Aspromonte, sits at the intersection of Environmental Humanities and Cultural Studies. She completed her PhD in 2022 at the Universities of Bristol and Cardiff, exploring Calabrian identity and self-representation in Calabria and Victoria (Australia) in light of stereotypes of crime and ‘backwardness’.