Callum Aitken (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
callum.aitken.22@ucl.ac.uk

Making wild, making weird, making Wisent: European bison introductions in the UK

Rewilding and species introductions seek to deploy non-human actors into environments to counteract biodiversity loss and improve ecosystem resilience. These projects involve complex entanglements between humans and animals in ever-changing environments, often neglected when studying their impact.

My project will be the first anthropological investigation into European bison in a non-native context, studying their introduction in Kent. The ethnography will examine how bison conform to and complicate ideas of ‘wildness’, as autonomous beings that act in ‘weird’, unplanned ways, within and against politicised ontologies of care and control, additionally asking how new species might encourage local engagement with Anthropocene landscapes.

Principal supervisor: Dr Lewis Daly