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Paper short abstract

Drawing from multispecies ethnographic research conducted in New York City, I explore the ways that rats’ home-making practices pester understandings and knowledge of ownership and property, belonging, and resilience.

Paper long abstract

Through multispecies ethnographic research conducted in New York City during the summer of 2025, I explore the ways that rats’ home-making practices pester understandings of ownership and property, belonging, and resilience. Whether it’s a burrow or a borough, we are all making our homes somewhere. Rat home-making practices confuse where the NYC borough ends and the rat burrow begins, highlighting the tensions created through conflicting home-making and place-making practices. Using Kafka’s The Burrow as a speculative starting point to explore a moment in the field where a pest professional and I encountered a rat burrow built on the lawn of an apartment complex, I consider the ways that human and rat home-making practices confuse a clear demarcation of host and guest, invited and uninvited. By taking the perspective of Kafka’s burrowing creature, we are called upon to consider our responsibility to the Other – as host to rats (in our home) and as guests to rats (when we encounter rat burrows), and how we produce knowledge of these categories through ideas of private property. Next, I consider how rats’ home-making practices confuse ideas of belonging in public spaces by building their burrow within the cracks of hostile architecture. I conclude with the observation of rats making their home within bait stations, the black box that houses the poison meant to kill them, to suggest that the small acts of caring for and decorating a place that is actively trying to kill you is a form of resistance and resilience.