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Paper short abstract:

How does living and working with horses open up new - or long-forgotten - ways of thinking about and shaping the homes and habitats we share?

Paper long abstract:

Domestic animals have lived and evolved alongside us for centuries, rendering them key actors in shaping our understanding and experience of home and work. Yet they remain largely absent from our theoretical conceptualisations of both (Coulter 2016; Fudge 2008).

Anthropology has played a key role in defining the home. Douglas (1991; 289) conceptualised the home as “space under control,” in which time and resources are allocated and organised. Recent research focuses on relational and utopian aspects, namely how the home brings together the physical and the affective, the local and the global (O’Connor 2017). At the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic – and the accompanying rise of homeworking – has unsettled and problematised the relationship between home and work (Chung et al. 2020).

Animals challenge these and other “human” categories (Fudge 2008). Horse-human relations offer a particularly useful vantage point as riding affords a unique level of physicality, intimacy and intensity (Dashper 2016). Our paper therefore centres on an ethnographic study of the UK horse-logging community. Specifically, we draw on the theoretical ideas of Gibson-Graham (2006) to explore how people and horses “prefigure” different approaches to living and working together in remote and threatened forests in northern England. Within our findings, horses emerge as co-habitants, co-workers and epistemological partners, shaping people’s understanding and experience of home and work, and embedding them within the wider natural-social environment. We conclude that interspecies relations can thereby contribute to creating a more liveable world in the here and now for people, horses and others.