Worlding Sanctuary
Multispecies design ethnography on a farm animal sanctuary in Aotearoa
Abstract
Farm animal sanctuaries represent shared life-worlds between the human and nonhuman animal inhabitants. With a focus on the co-creation of sanctuary spaces and practices as acts of worlding and world-building, this paper presents a case study of the challenges and opportunities that arise when combining ethnography and creative practice. Beginning with a cultural analysis of farm sanctuary memoirs, I situate my local project within global narratives. Then, I describe my short-term ethnographic fieldwork experience and its relation to my creative practice. The final section of this article outlines the beginning of my shift from ethnographic inquiry into speculative narrative and provides an example of my creative work. Comparing and contrasting this with the anthropological literature on animal sanctuaries, I argue that a purposeful entanglement of multispecies ethnography and speculative narrative offers a unique way not just to understand multispecies relations but also to imagine new life-worlds.
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