Antarctica Reframed: Material Histories and Genealogies of Human Presence (acronym AWAY) has been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The project is one of nine ERC Advanced Grants awarded to researchers at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in the 2025 call, confirming the institution's strong performance in one of Europe's most prestigious and competitive funding schemes.
Antarctica is widely imagined as a pristine and uninhabited continent, despite more than two centuries of human presence. It is often portrayed as a place where humanity is only now arriving. This image has long been reinforced by scientific and geopolitical framings and only partially challenged by the humanities. As a result, a critical and sustained examination of what the expansion of humanity into Antarctica has actually entailed is still lacking.For AWAY, what appears today as an untouched wilderness is, in fact, the outcome of a long historical process. The project investigates how human presence in Antarctica has been materially configured, remembered, and projected over time. It does so through the first materially grounded, continent-wide, long-term study of human presence on the continent.AWAY starts from a simple premise: things do not merely enable human presence; they configure it. Their relations across space and time shape territories, memories, and futures. To trace these relations, the project adopts a relational, genealogical, and multiscale approach through carefully selected comparative case studies.The project is structured around three analytical axes. Inhabiting analyses the extent to which Antarctica has been materially inhabited through regionally and temporally differentiated forms. Remembering investigates how diverse Antarctic pasts have been materially produced over time. Prototyping explores the extent to which Antarctic prototypes enact ruptures or continuities with earlier forms of presence.The project has broader implications. It offers a new perspective on Antarctica, with potential consequences for how the continent is understood, studied, and protected. This is particularly significant in the context of the climate crisis, as Antarctica occupies a central place in contemporary debates on science, environmental governance, and extraplanetary futures. Beyond Antarctica itself, AWAY aims to open new ways of understanding how human presence takes shape on Earth, offering new insights into the contemporary world.
The Principal Investigator of AWAY is María Ximena Senatore Connolly. The project has been awarded €2,497,000 and will run for five years.AWAY is one of the nine ERC Advanced Grants awarded to researchers at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in the 2026 call. The ERC Advanced Grant scheme supports ambitious, ground-breaking projects led by established researchers with an internationally recognised record of research excellence.Other ERC Advanced Grants awarded to CSIC researchers went to Ignacio de la Torre and Julio Escalona (Instituto de Historia, IH); Juan José Ibáñez (Institución Milà i Fontanals, IMF); Liset M. de la Prida and Christian Lüescher (Centro de Neurociencias Cajal, CNC); Elisa Martí (Instituto de Biología Molecular de Barcelona, IBMB); Javier Parcet (Instituto de Ciencias Matemáticas, ICMAT); and Juli G. Pausas (Centro de Investigaciones sobre Desertificación, CIDE).With these results, CSIC further strengthens its leadership in securing highly competitive European research funding, while AWAY strengthens INCIPIT-CSIC as a leading centre for Antarctic humanities research.