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Paper short abstract

This paper develops "affective perspectivism" through ethnography of Chinese migrants relocating to the UK with pets, asking what rigorous non-human inclusion looks like when humans remain the primary interpretive instrument.

Paper long abstract

What happens when humans, animals, and bureaucratic institutions are forced into the same space—and none of them speak the same language? This paper examines the three-way entanglement between Chinese migrants, their companion animals, and the regulatory systems governing cross-border mobility from China to the UK, asking what "more-than-human" research can realistically deliver when institutions actively deny the relational nature of multispecies life.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews and digital ethnography, I develop the concept of affective perspectivism: a situated perceptual capacity cultivated through sustained cohabitation, enabling humans to navigate between institutional demands that classify animals as cargo and the cross-species bonds that resist such categorisation. I trace three interconnected perspectival positions—the "pure human perspective" enforced by bureaucratic compliance, the "animal-facing perspective" cultivated through embodied cohabitation, and the "owner's perspective" as a site of absorbing contradictions between incommensurable worlds.

What emerges is not a triumphant story of multispecies solidarity, but a more uncomfortable one: institutions shape what animals can become in transit; animals' distress and needs restructure human subjectivity; and humans absorb the contradictions neither system acknowledges. Grounding the framework in controlled equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004), I argue that this three-way friction—rather than any one actor's perspective—is where the methodological and ethical challenges of more-than-human research actually live.