Multispecies Leisure: Human-Animal Interactions in Leisure Landscapes

Paula Danby, Katherine Dashper, Rebecca Finkel, Paula Danby, Katherine Dashper, Rebecca Finkel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000357110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Multispecies Leisure: Human-Animal Interactions in Leisure Landscapes seeks to 'bring the animal in' to the leisure studies domain and contribute to greater understanding of leisure as a complex, interwoven multispecies phenomenon.

The emerging multidisciplinary field of human-animal studies encourages researchers to move beyond narrow focus on human-centric practices and ways of being in the world, and to recognise that human and non-human beings are positioned within shared ecological, social, cultural and political spaces. With some exceptions, leisure studies has been slow to embrace the 'animal turn' and consider how leisure actions, experiences and landscapes are shaped through multispecies encounters between humans, other animals, birds and insects, plants and environment. This book begins to address this gap by presenting research that considers leisure as more-than-human experiences. The authors consider leisure with nonhuman others (e.g. dogs, horses), affecting those others (e.g. environmental concerns) and affected by the non-human (e.g. landscape, weather), by exploring the 'contact zones' between humans and other species. Thus, this work contributes to greater understanding of leisure as a complex, multispecies phenomenon.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a Special Issue of the Leisure Studies.

Multispecies leisure: human-animal interactions in leisure landscapes

Paula Danby, Katherine Dashper and Rebecca Finkel

Introduction

Leisure is a multispecies practice. From the excitement and close interaction of human and horse tackling a show jumping course, to the joy and playfulness of a child throwing a ball for her dog, to the peaceful comfort of a human and a cat relaxing on the sofa together, leisure practices and spaces often involve multiple species, sometimes acting together, sometimes separately and sometimes in opposition. These shared and often messy entanglements between human and nonhuman animals are integral to the experiences, practices and meanings of leisure. Dashper (2018) argues that our leisure lives are often richer because of nonhuman animals, who play, relax, compete and work with and for us, and that leisure studies needs to acknowledge these more-than-human encounters if we are to understand better some of the nuances of leisure in multispecies worlds. With some exceptions (e.g. Carr, 2014; Dashper, 2017b; Markwell, 2015), leisure studies has been slow to embrace the ‘animal turn’ sweeping the wider social sciences and humanities, and to consider how leisure actions, experiences and landscapes are shaped through multispecies encounters between humans, other animals, birds and insects, plants and the environment. This special issue is a contribution to the project of ‘bringing animals in’ to leisure studies, and recognising that leisure is part of a complex, vibrant and sometimes chaotic multispecies world.

The emerging multidisciplinary field of human-animal studies encourages researchers to move beyond a narrow focus on human-centric practices and ways of being in the world, and to recognise that human and nonhuman beings are positioned within shared ecological, social, cultural and political spaces. Wider social debates related to ethics and welfare, environmental concerns and climate change, and human rights and responsibilities to the wider world, are not detached from the field of leisure studies which is both influenced by and can influence wider discourses. The broader field of human-animal studies has tended to focus on topics such as care, welfare and work, or specific human-animal encounters, such as those between people and companion animals or pets (Charles, 2014; Clarke & Knights, 2018; Coulter, 2016), and leisure has received much less focus to date. Our aim with this special issue was to challenge leisure researchers to think beyond our taken-for-granted humanist frameworks and to consider explicitly the ways in which leisure spaces and practices are co-produced, shaped and experienced by human and nonhuman animals, and what those multispecies encounters add to understandings of leisure as integral to our well-being and happiness in contemporary societies.

This introduction begins with a brief discussion of what we mean by the terms ‘multispecies’ and ‘more-than-human’ and some of the theoretical and methodological challenges that adopting posthumanist frameworks may pose for leisure researchers. We then go on to consider what such perspectives might add to the field of leisure studies, and discuss some of the existing research in this area. The next section introduces the papers in this special issue, which show the diversity and richness of multispecies perspectives on leisure, and the possibilities for advancing understanding in this emerging field. The final section suggests some areas for further development in research on multispecies leisure.

More-than-human and multispecies perspectives

Leisure studies, and the social sciences more broadly, is strongly anthropocentric, positioning humans as the only legitimate focus for study, and concentrating on human priorities, experiences and practices (Dashper, 2018; Finkel & Danby, 2018). If nonhumans do appear in research, they are usually confined to a background role, reduced to species-level, and only considered if their actions or behaviours affect human outcomes (Catlin, Hughes, Jones, Jones, & Campbell, 2013). Within this work, individual animals and their unique subjectivities disappear from view, and their ‘animalness’ is presented only in relation to their value to humans. A growing body of researchers are now recognising that this is untenable, and that nonhumans are more than just backdrops for human lives and are instead active agents, with their own inner lives and interests, priorities and rights (Cooke, 2011; Sanders, 1990). The seminal work of Donna Haraway (2003) has strongly influenced theoretical development in this field, and her claim that ‘[t]o be one is always to become with many’ (2008,p. 4, italics in original), underpins the ‘animal turn’ that recognises the inseparability of human and nonhuman in what is undeniably a multispecies world. More-than-human approaches make this explicit and aim to explore the ‘contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and co-produced niches’ (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010, p. 546).

More-than-human approaches within leisure aim to explore new modes of being and becoming in the contemporary world. Various theoretical approaches that rethink human-centredness have focused on the complexities surrounding interactions between humans and nonhuman animals, along with places, landscapes and objects. Posthumanism, as well as Actor Network Theory (ANT) and non-representational theories, seeks to explore and develop spatialities, politics and ethical considerations associated with humans and nonhumans, whereby the singular focus surrounding the human subject is challenged and boundaries become blurred. Instone (1998) alerts us to the fact that a postmodern world blurs the boundaries between nature, society, humans and nonhuman animals. Panelli (2010) articulates that ANT rejects the distinction between the human and the nonhuman animal, indicating that the nonhuman animal is more often than not the most important actant in the human material world. DeMello (2012) argues that nonhumans should ideally enjoy a life of love and attention, as well as humans. Bowes, Keller, Rollins, and Gifford (2015) acknowledge that trans-species social bonds are driven by multifarious factors including the desire for power, control, affection and kinship that promote wide-ranging benefits. This ‘animal turn’ acknowledges the embodied knowledge or indeed a ‘sensorialontology’ which arises when species meet and interact (Barad, 2008; Hayward, 2010; Hurn, 2012).

These theories and approaches are complex and diverse, and detailed discussion of them is beyond the scope of this article. However, all these positions share the posthumanist goal to decentre human authority and recognise explicitly that nonhumans can and do shape our worlds and our experiences, for good and for bad. As Peggs (2013) argues, even if we restrict our research attention to human societies and practices alone (and neither she nor we are suggesting we should do so), we still should consider relations with nonhumans in our research, as these constitute integral facets of our everyday experiences. Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, and Blaise (2016, p. 2) acknowledge the long-standing resistance to accounting for the experiences and practices of nonhumans in social science research, arguing that ‘[t]he insistence that we live in not just exclusively human societies but in common worlds with other species runs counter to the human-centric impulse to divide ourselves off from the rest of the world and re-enact the self-perpetuating nature/culture divide.’ More-than-human perspectives, in their varying forms, represent attempts to challenge this divide and recognise the complex, interwoven ‘common worlds’ in which we are all embedded.

As Buller (2014, p. 309) argues, ‘animals are beginning, at last, to make their presence (or absence) felt and matter’. This raises challenging theoretical, methodological and practical issues for researchers. What does it mean to ‘bring animals in’ to research? How can we try and decentre human perspectives, and give some kind of ‘voice’ to nonhuman animals? How can we try and represent the deeply embodied, usually non-verbal interactions between species that constitute multispecies encounters, when we are tied by the conventions of academia to the written word? Dowling, Lloyd, and Suchet-Pearson (2017, p. 824) suggest that this needs us to radically rethink how we do research and ‘to perform, to engage, to embody, to image and imagine, to witness, to sense, to analyse – across, through, with and as, more-than-humans.’

The subpractice of multispecies ethnography attempts to engage with this process, to focus on ‘the lively connections among species (often, but not always, including humans), their collective effects and their ethical implications’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016, p. 1149). This is difficult and requires attempting to shift our focus from our human perspectives alone and our preference for visual and verbal cues and, instead, to try and engage our bodies as multispecies research instruments, as ‘part of the ethnographic script’ (Madden, 2014, p. 282). This may encourage more interdisciplinary research in leisure studies, drawing on ethology, ecology and other natural sciences to supplement our social science perspectives and to try and begin to bridge the nature-culture divide. It may lead to more personal, introspective accounts of interspecies relationships and encounters, drawing on (auto)ethnography and narrative techniques to try and capture some of the emotive richness of multispecies leisure (see Harmon, 2019). Multispecies research has potential to disrupt dominant narratives and theoretical perspectives in leisure studies and to open up new ways of thinking about, writing about and doing research.

The more-than-human theoretical approach to human-nonhuman relations within leisure, whilst providing a more innovative mode of enquiry within the leisure landscape, also helps us to contextualise human-nonhuman experiential encounters. One of the challenges of trying to adopt a multispecies lens concerns the lack of overt descriptive reflection that arises from interspecies encounters, in that humans may find it difficult to describe, understand and explain such relationships and emotional interactions due to the lack of ‘vocal’ expression from nonhumans. As a result, Game (2001) argues there is a requirement for interconnectedness between species, indicating a need to respect and understand each other’s differences to communicate more effectively, often on deeply embodied, nonverbal terms. She refers to an ‘in-between’ stage where the human becomes part nonhuman and the nonhuman part human, through sustained interaction. Including nonhuman animals as actors in research and opening up to cross-species communications emergent through the leisure landscape enables a sharing of mutual realities between humans and nonhumans (Danby, 2018). Social exchanges and embodied interaction between humans and nonhumans play significant roles, as through varying encounters human and nonhuman are able to anticipate and acknowledge each other’s needs and behaviours by assessing a range of bodily cues. Such non-anthropocentric ontological perspectives emphasise how the the leisure landscape may be populated and co-constituted by varying humans and nonhumans, through myriad assemblages they engage with, together and separately (Lorimer, 2009).

To really take on multispecies perspectives is difficult, and poses challenges to leisure researchers more used to focusing on human-human interactions, and human activities, priorities and experiences. As Birke and Hockenhull (2012) articulate, studying interspecies bonds is not easy and methodologies tend to focus upon one actor rather than another, and additionally, we are dealing with relations of two very different kinds of beings. However, just because something is challenging does not mean we should not attempt to engage with it, and in the next section we introduce research on different leisure practices that draw on explicitly more-than-human perspectives, and in so doing, open up interesting theoretical, methodological and practical insights about leisure and leisure research.

Leisure as a multispecies practice

Nonhuman animals are integral to myriad human leisure experiences and help enhance many people’s physical, psychological and social well-being (Danby, 2018; Dashper, 2018; Finkel & Danby, 2018; Hallberg, 2008; Young & Carr, 2018). The papers in this special issue are not the first to consider some aspects of multispecies leisure, although the earlier research is relatively dispersed around different journals and outlets. Whilst we acknowledge that this literature is diverse and covers many different contexts and issues, we have identified three core areas in the wider literature on multispecies leisure which we discuss here: dogs and dog agility; equestrian/ horse leisure; and multispecies tourism. We have chosen to focus on leisure with dogs and with horses because these are the nonhuman animals with whom humans share the most intimate, active, diverse and collaborative leisure relationships. People involve both dogs and horses in a variety of leisure practices, often involving complex and nuanced interspecies communication, in ways rarely experienced between humans and other species. Multispecies tourism is our third area for discussion as it encompasses a broader variety of interspecies interactions than either human-canine or human-equine leisure, and research highlights some of the complex issues of power and responsibility that underpin all interspecies encounters, including those experienced through leisure.

Human-dog relationships are often extremely close, and offer numerous affordances for performing multispecies leisure. Carr (2014) has considered a wide range of human-dog activities and practices in his discussion of dog-related leisure, ranging from dog holidays, to dog cuisine, and dogs as ‘leisure objects’. Sanders (1999) has explored human-dog interactions through various leisure and work practices, while Fletcher and Platt (2018) consider the routine dog walk ...