panel 27
Care and Carelessness in More-Than-Human Entanglements
“I Would Like You to Hold My Bone While I Chew It": Bringing Dogs into the Question of Care
Julia Linares-Roake, Andrea V. Breen & Erika Cudworth
Do our dogs care for us?
This question – and the question of reciprocal care work – has been brought up in recent feminist and disability research around the non-human animal (Coulter, 2016; Cudworth, 2022; Price, 2017). Companion animals, such as dogs, are thought to provide emotional care through physical and mental comfort, often at the expense of their own interests (Cudworth, 2022). Mariam Motademi Fraser (2024) similarly argues that the work done to embody an anthropocentric version of the ideal dog is in itself a form of care labour required to escape the very real possibility of becoming disposable. However, research has not fully explored how the non-human animal experiences these reciprocal caregiving relationships (Coulter, 2016).
In a recent Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded research study, we asked twenty participants the question: “Do you think your dog cares about you?” The first phase - part of a multi-phased research project aimed at decentring the human through creative and arts-based methods – invited dog-human kin to join a researcher on a walk, outdoor excursion, or leisurely space of the assemblages’ choice. Dogs were affixed with video cameras (when comfortable), as were their humans, in an attempt to decentre the human and to connect the embodied and visual experiences of the walk (Freedman & Siegesmund, 2024; Hamilton & Taylor, 2017). The humans within the research would talk about care and caregiving within multispecies households, often in spaces where multiple caring roles were being navigated.
In this presentation, we discuss: (1) the potential worldmaking of making dogs visually and auditorily present within the research praxis; (2) humans’ perception of and belief that their dogs do (or do not) care for them, often through emotional or indirect ways; and (3) how humans make sense of their dogs’ care role in the multispecies relationship.
References
Charles, N. (2014). “Animals just love you as you are”: Experiencing kinship across the species barrier. Sociology, 48(4), 715-730. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038513515353
Coulter, K. (2016). Beyond human to humane: A multispecies analysis of care work, its repression, and its potential. Studies in Social Justice, 10(2), 199-219. https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v10i2.1350
Cudworth, E. (2022). Labors of love: Work, labor and care in dog-human relations. Gender, Work & Organization, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12814
Fraser, M. M. (2024). Dog politics: Species stories and the animal sciences. Manchester University Press.
Freedman, K., & Siegesmund, R. (2024). Visual methods of inquiry: Images as research. Routledge.
Hamilton, & Taylor, N. (2017). Ethnography after humanism: Power, politics and method in multi-species research. Palgrave Macmillan.
Price, M. (2017). What is a service animal? A careful rethinking. Review of Disability Studies, 13(4), 1-18. https://rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/757
Julia Linares-Roake (she/they) is a PhD Candidate at the University of Guelph, in the Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition. She received her undergraduate degree in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and her Master’s degree in Learning, Developmental, and Family Sciences at the University of Colorado, Denver. Their research interests include critical feminist posthumanism, more-than-human care relationships, and interspecies play. Their dissertation work focuses on multispecies flourishing through relational play, using creative and critical theoretical and methodological orientations. Julia is the Research Coordinator of the SSHRC-funded study (PI: Dr. Andrea Breen), Family Care Work in Interspecies Homes. They also work as a Research Shop Project Manager at the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI), working with the University of Guelph and community partners to engage in critical, creative, and community-based praxis.
Dr. Andrea V. Breen (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Family Relations and Human Development at the University of Guelph where her research interests include anti-colonial research methodologies, storytelling and identity, and dog-human relationships. Andrea holds degrees in education and developmental psychology from McGill University (BEd), the Harvard Graduate School of Education (EdM), and the University of Toronto (PhD). Andrea spent several years learning about the dog side of dog-human relationships. She earned both her dog training certification and the Advanced Diploma in Canine Behaviour through the International School for Canine Psychology and Behaviour (ISCP). Andrea is an associate member of the Pet Dog Trainers of Europe (PDTE) and a founding member of the Association of Dynamic Dog Practitioners. She is also a volunteer with SafePet Ontario and she has a small practice as a canine behaviour consultant (ABCs 4 Dogs).
Dr. Erika Cudworth currently works in the School of Applied Social Sciences at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Relationships between humans and non-human animals have been her preoccupation across her academic career. She is delighted that this is a far less lonely road to travel than it was when she first set out. Erika’s research interests include complexity theory, gender, and theoretical and political challenges to exclusive humanism. Her books include Environment and Society (2003), Developing Ecofeminist Theory (2005), Social Lives with Other Animals (2011), and the co-authored Posthuman International Relations (2011) and The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism (2018). She has co-edited various collections, most recently Feminist Animal Studies (2023); and her new book Animal Entanglements: Muddied Living in Dog-Human Worlds will be published in 2024.
Caring for Cousins: Orangutans, Careless Consumerism, and the Green Logo-Ethico-Aesthetics of Patrick Rouxel’s Green (2009)
Alex Ventimilla
Some speculative realists posit aesthetic experience and technological mediation as integral to solving the global ecological crisis (Ivakhiv, 2013; Morton, 2013). For Timothy Morton, the Anthropocene “sets new parameters for aesthetic experience” (2013, p. 22), chief among these delivering “an appropriate level of shock and anxiety concerning… the ecological trauma of our age” (2013, pp. 8-9). For Adrian Ivakhiv, moving images are uniquely posed for such an intervention, “articulating interesting and innovative socio-ecological meanings” in ways that may elicit ecological thought (Ivakhiv, 2013, p. 12; see also Morton 2013). My paper draws from these insights to analyze Patrick Rouxel’s (2009) documentary Green. As a “network narrative” (Ivakhiv, 2013, p. 189), the film interweaves a range of seemingly discordant footage; from sublime cinematography of Indonesian rainforests and its catastrophic deforestation to satirical montages of consumerism crosscut with closeups of Green, a displaced orangutan dying under the care of wildlife officials. The latter focus on the ape unequivocally draws from the cultural bias and meanings that, as Ursula Heise explains, makes us “care about some endangered species” (Heise, 2016, p. 13). Yet Green (2009) forsakes the wildlife and eco-documentary film trope of drawing affective purchase from viewers’ appreciation for charismatic species for a heavy-handed environmentalist call to action (Bousé, 2000; Rooney, 2022). Rather, the film’s bizarre juxtaposition of images evincing the harrowingly inadequate care Green receives to sequences of commodity consumption frame the latter as acts of carelessness. The technical and tonal abruptness of these transitions, I argue, shock viewers by crystallizing our indifferent complicitness in Green’s death through our mundane consumption, as well as the irony of our affective attachment to both endangered species and commodities whose production endangers them. Nevertheless, I conclude, that the crystallization of this carelessness opens viewers of Green (2009) to a logo-ethico-aesthetics (Ivakhiv, 2018; Massumi, 2015);an apprehension for the “attention and care and abductive effort of understanding how things are interrelating” (Massumi, 2015, pp. 43-44), as well as “the openness of the world to change” through “the cultivation of habits” attentive to this interrelationality (Ivakhiv, 2018, p. 139).
References
Bousé, D. (2000). Wildlife films. University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812205848
Heise, U. K. (2016). Imagining extinction: The cultural meanings of endangered species. University of Chicago Press.
Ivakhiv, A. J. (2018). Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-realism for turbulent times. Punctum Books. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.66811
Ivakhiv, A. J. (2013). Ecologies of the moving image: Cinema, affect, nature. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Polity.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press.
Rooney, D. (2022). “All fishing is wildlife poaching:” Nonhuman animal imagery and mutual avowal in Racing Extinction and Seaspiracy. Journalism and Media, 3(2), 257-277. https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia3020020
Rouxel, P. (Director). (2009). Green: Death of the forests [Film].
Alex Ventimilla is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His research interests span the environmental humanities with a focus on ecological narratives, eco-cinema, and critical animal studies. His doctoral project analyzes the ways in which documentary representations of biodiversity loss and conservation shape the collective experience, discourse, and cultural politics of mass extinction.
A Liquid Gold Rush at the Mother Load
Lena Chen
Set against the backdrop of an artist residency that overlooks the parasitic “Strangler Tree” (the oldest tree in Palermo, Italy), this autotheoretical essay examines the feminist and ecological dimensions of care work. Drawing parallels between the extraction of breast milk from mothers and the extraction of minerals from the Earth, I take lactation as a starting point for exploring more-than-human entanglements, reproductive labor, and the exploitation of natural resources. I cite Patty Chang’s multi-channel video installation Milk Debt as well as my own performance Mother To Mother, in which I paint a courtyard with surplus breast milk, as case studies illustrating my theory of the “mother load.” This theory acknowledges the distinctly gendered impacts of climate change on care and labor, as well as the disproportionate burden shouldered by those marginalized due to race, class, and disability.
Lena Chen is a Chinese American writer, scholar, and artist. Her scholarship proposes a theory of the Asian female gaze and Asian female supremacy. She has contributed to the edited volumes Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge, 2022) and Sex Work Now (NYU Press, 2024). Chen holds a BA in sociology from Harvard University and a MFA from Carnegie Mellon School of Art. Encompassing new media, moving image, social practice, and performance, her creative practice examines Asian American histories of sex, labor, and migration. A recipient of Mozilla Foundation’s 2022 Creative Media Award, she has exhibited and performed at Transmediale, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Färgfabriken, Baltimore Museum of Art, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Sheffield DocFest, Ars Electronica, among others. Creating feminist networks of care and platforms for self-representation, she has produced socially engaged projects with communities such as mothers, trauma survivors, sex workers, and abortion providers. She is a founding member of the mother/artist collective, Maternal Fantasies; founder of Heal Her, an expressive arts initiative that has convened events in seven countries for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence; and founder of JADED, the largest Asian American artistic platform in Western Pennsylvania.
Location
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
23-25 January 2025
Kontakt der Kontinenten, Amersfoortsestraat 20
3769 AS Soesterberg
Online
Contact info Louis van den Hengel
Images homepage: Merel Visse, Christine Leroy
design website: Johanne de Heus and Marielle Schuurman