It’s a bright beautiful morning as I stand outside a local coffee roaster off the cobbled high street in the Sussex town of Lewes. It’s my first visit to this café which has been suggested to me by a friend who only recently moved back to the area from travelling abroad. Quite unassuming from the outside, I peer through the window where I immediately see a hustle and bustle of activity. Groups of friends, solo visitors, and couples occupy each table, and multiple floor spaces and laps are taken by four legged friends. As I step through the threshold, I find my senses are awash with smells and sounds of my new surroundings. My hearing adjusts, there is comfort in the blend of background noises, the mechanical grinding of beans, the steaming of milk and the chatter of conversation. I inhale deeply as the scent of coffee envelopes my nostrils. It’s like entering another world. A world which is oddly familiar for a first encounter.
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Tag Archives: covid-19
Guiding Emotions: Interspecies, Qualitative Research During a Pandemic
A few months into 2020, governments internationally introduced varying degrees of lockdowns and social distancing to combat the spread of the SAR-CoV-2 virus (Gollwitzer et al. 2020). Seemingly overnight, PhD candidates were faced with entirely redesigning their data collection process, navigating through a cloud of urgency and uncertainty (Roy and Uekusa, 2020: 384). I wish to discuss some of the challenges of conducting virtual, symbiotic ethics research in pandemic environments and, without wishing to sound distasteful, some potential “silver linings” found in doing so. I began a PhD in anthrozoology in January of 2020, which defines the emotional labour of guide dogs and their instructors at Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind (also known as GDMIs). When referring to emotional labour, I refer to the management of feelings to portray professional demeanours in work-related interactions (Hochschild, 1979; 1983). This became a challenge, as I am living in Germany with interlocutors based in Ireland. Research concerning trans-species work, as well as emotion management, is often explored through participant observation. Therefore, this research, an intersection of both, found itself in a unique position when placed under travel restrictions and social distancing measures. The pandemic ushered forward questions of how multispecies ethnographies can be approached in posthuman, pandemic, and post-pandemic environments.
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Not the Last Pandemic
One researcher, one culture, one year. That is the traditional ideal for good ethnography (Randall et al., 2007). But how do you spend time in another culture when you can’t even leave your living room? When the COVID-19 pandemic struck I was preparing to travel to Kenya. Not for a year and not to write the traditional ethnography, but to conduct research for the new type of ethnography, a multispecies ethnography of a conservation encounter (Kiik, 2018; Moore, 2017). My research focuses on the ways that malignant catarrhal fever (a disease of wildebeest) affects Maasai livelihoods and conservation efforts. My time in Kenya would have revolved around interviewing local Maasai herders about their experiences with the disease and observing wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) to determine if Maasai persecution of them is changing their behavior, as is the case with other animals in human areas (Kioko et al., 2015; Ogutu et al., 2005; Schuette et al., 2013). However, when travel became impossible the staple methodologies behind my research also became impossible. In fact, the staple methodology, fieldwork, behind all anthropological research became impossible. So, what should we do? Should we sit in our ivory tower twiddling our thumbs and wait for the pandemic to pass? Should we then resume business as usual? What happens when the next pandemic strikes, as it certainly will?
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Anthrozoology as Symbiotic Ethics 