Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of bodies and dangerous cityscapes by taking a more-than-human perspective to the sensing of urban danger. Drawing on research in Kingston, Jamaica, I focus on the role of Kingston's many security dogs in mediating between humans and the urban environment.

Paper long abstract:

In urban contexts with high levels of violent crime, fear plays a large role in residents' experience of the city. This fear of urban violence is mediated through discourse, for instance through regular news reports of homicides and through the everyday talk of crime. However, fear is also an embodied experience that is connected to sensory perception and atmospheric attunement, including the ability to recognize sights and sounds that mark a place as dangerous. This paper explores the intersection of bodies and dangerous cityscapes by taking a more-than-human perspective to this sensing of urban danger. Drawing on research in Kingston, Jamaica, I focus on the role of Kingston's many security dogs in mediating between humans and the urban environment. How do those who live and work in the city construct and experience its threats through interspecies sociality with security dogs? What different embodied relations to the city do dogs enable for security professionals such as private security guards, and for residents positioned differently in the urban hierarchy? Can we understand dogs as not just a companion species, but a prosthetic species, whose olfactory and auditory acuity extends humans' capacity to sense the city and its dangers? I suggest that attending to the entanglement of both human and non-human animal bodies with the urban environment can provide new insights into everyday perception, construction and negotiation of fearful cityscapes.