Now, where were we?’: The highs and lows of hunting data with a research pack

Abstract

The boundaries of the social have been stretched by recent scholarship in sociological animal studies. Social theory has been challenged by the posthuman turn (Cudworth, 2011a;Peggs, 2012; Taylor and Signal, 2011), and empirical work on families and households, popular culture, rurality, work and even sleep has begun to open up to the presence of the myriad other creatures that make up social worlds (respectively Charles, 2016;Cole and Stewart, 2014;Wilkie, 2010;Coulter, 2015; Hsu 2017). Much of this research, almost inevitably, relies on standard practices in both sociological research and in the representation of non-human beings and things. That is to say, non-human animals are included via humans talking and writing about them. We may include other animals in our projects, but we do so predominantly through standard human-centred methods.This paper reflects on a piece of research characterised by such contradiction and thereby considers the difficulties and possibilities of more-than-human methods, specifically ethnography. The data which provides the scaffolding for the empirical reflections is drawn from two sources: field notes observing interactions between "packs" of dog and human walkers and interviews with those living with dogs. What was methodologically distinctive, was that the majority of interviews were 'go-along' or 'walk and talk' where the researcher and two of the dogs-of-her-heart walked with human interviewees and their dog(s), allowing for observations of human/dog and dog/dog interactions also to be recorded.Other interviews were undertaken at interviewees' homes or in public places where the interviewees' animal companions were present. In addition, there was a period of intensive immersion -an ethnographic diary kept for a calendar year in the London field site which recorded events, interactions and routines of dogs, humans and other beings and things in

Labors of love: Work, labor, and care in dog–human relations

“…Veissier and Miele (2014; also Birke & Hockenhull, 2012) have suggested that genuinely multispecies research needs multi‐ or inter‐disciplinary approaches involving research teams with expertise in the science of animal behavior as well as social sciences. I have much sympathy with this suggestion and am conscious of the human bias in this project (Cudworth, 2018). Despite such caveats, ethnographic observation, conversations, and interviews do enable non‐humans to be present to some degree, in the data.…”

Researching towards a critically posthumanist future: on the political “doing” of critical research for companion animal liberation

“…This request in itself notably signalled to human participants (and to readers) that the wishes and bodily autonomy of non-human animals (in not being forcibly moved into the interview zone) were to be respected, constructing them as valued subjects rather than research objects. Of course, multi-species interviews introduce some new challenges, namely that non-human animals did not seem to particularly know or care that the interview was taking place (see also Cudworth, 2018) and many an interview was punctuated by non-human animal vocalisations:…”

Japanese Animals in Calamity

“…It does not reflect the material conditions of animal companions who are legally defined as property with minimal welfare safeguards in law. None of the human participants in my study used this term, describing themselves and others as ‘owners.’ (Cudworth 2018 : 500)…”