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METHODS

Project methods take inspiration from Jennifer Wolch who observed that (bar one exception) no animal geographers “have considered animal thinking and behavior per se to better understand their subjectivity and ideas about people” (2002: 728).


The questions guiding this study therefore revolve around animals’ lives and how humans conceive them through the narrow prism of their brief encounters.

For example, what constitutes a typical day/week for a zoo animal, a racehorse or greyhound, or an agricultural animal on exhibition? How much time do they spend travelling, caged, and on display? Do they have contact with other animals? What do they typically experience in terms of sights, sounds, and smells? How do they react to these experiences, to encounters with humans, and to the demands on their bodies? What is the animal’s history and their likely future? How do the humans that view these spectacles understand and make sense of the animals’ lives? What social practices are these spectacles part of? What are their functions and meanings to those who participate in them? What is the role of animals in these practices? How do visitors to zoos, races and agricultural shows understand ‘nature’ and their relationship to it?

To answer these questions, this research draws on sensory and ‘live’ methods that are open to, and immersed, in the liveliness of events and attuned to the ‘temporal topographies’ of human-nonhuman interactions. It seeks to go beyond apolitical articulations of multi-species ethnography by embracing ‘heretical’ methods that illuminate inequality and injustice (Hodgetts and Lorimer 2015; Kopnina 2017). Such ‘monstrous methods’ demand a multi-sensory openness to the world of the nonhuman other, allowing “their bodies and their senses [to] be interpreted as a form of communication” (Hamilton and Taylor 2017:126).

Data collection is organized into four phases:

  1. A focus on nonhuman animals in the ‘beastly spaces’ (Philo and Wilbert 2000) of the zoo, racing carnival and agricultural show, exploring their material, spatial and temporal arrangements.

  2. Tracking individual animals over time

  3. Interviews with visitors to these sites to explore the meanings and understandings those who interact with these animals associate with them, and with the practices they are part of.

  4. An exploration of counter-sites of ‘abnormal’ relations’, where the normalised social order has been disrupted, the practices associated with them and how these are constituted.

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Methods: About
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