Worlding Sanctuary
Multispecies design ethnography on a farm animal sanctuary in Aotearoa
Abstract
My PhD thesis centres the shared life-worlds of human and nonhuman animals within farm animal sanctuaries as a means to understand and re-imagine multispecies relations. 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 experience doing short-term ethnographic fieldwork and its relation to my creative practice. 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 to not just understand multispecies relations but to also imagine new life-worlds.
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