Paper short abstract:

Grounded in the case study of hypoallergenic dogs this paper tracks how the expansion of participation to nonhuman animals is entwined with the contraction of counterpublic activism, due to a valorisation of methods and conceptual frameworks that centre embodiment, proximity and affect.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past two decades, a prominent strand of STS has emphasised the agency of nonhuman beings and sought concrete ways of enabling nonhumans to participate in formulating matters of concern: from Latour’s ‘parliament of things’, to uses of participatory and sensory methods to make the desires of nonhuman animals legible. In this scholarship, aspiration to facilitate more politically inclusive approaches toward animals has resulted in an emphasis on curiosity and attentiveness to embodied relations as ways of registering agency. These developments are often understood in a positive light. The emphasis on knowledge generated through attentive, embodied relations has (seemingly) generated radically inclusive approaches to expanding what participation means. These approaches have contested the invisibility of nonhuman animals who have traditionally been unable to engage in narrow deliberative, discursive models of participation, or, worse, whose agency has been erased by human proxies who presumed to speak for them.

In contrast, this paper turns to emerging conflicts about the rise of ‘hypoallergenic dogs’ – which have enrolled companion species, veterinary professionals, activists, and gig workers in controversies about new breeding practices – to foreground exclusions in apparently inclusive depictions of nonhuman animal participation. Through this controversy, the paper traces how apparently radical expansions of participation beyond ‘the human’ are entwined with contractions in how contentious, counter-public activism is perceived to participate in political debates about nonhuman animals. It concludes by articulating how scholarship on the role of complicity (Shotwell; Williams and Hollin), incommensurability (Liboiron), and indifference (Davé) can offer alternative trajectories.