Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork within a contact zone of animal welfare activists and a group of street dogs in Podgorica, this paper explores how the dogs’ relational agentive mobilities reveal, challenge, and transgress urban spatial rules.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the mobilities of the Ćemovsko Dogs, a group of street dogs located within a brownfield area in Podgorica as relational agency (Latour 2005; Ingold, 2011; Tsing 2012; Fenske 2020) with the space and the humans of the contact zone (Haraway 2008). The dogs' mobilities reveal, challenge, and transgress the urban spatial rules the brownfield area is embedded in. It is mostly used as a transition zone, for sport, and includes a hobby airport and Montenegro’s only park for dog owners and their dogs. Within this Postsocialist, lately highly capitalized and Europeanized city, keeping dogs as pets has become a spreading trend in the past decades. Being the side effects of this trend, street dogs are perceived as beings between the traditional categories of the domesticated dog who lives with an owner, and the wild animal, that is not dependent on human’s care at all and is hunted to be controlled in population. The spatial appropriations of the Ćemovsko Dogs as liminal agents reveal, challenge, and transgress the classical rules of animal spaces that are given to animals in human systems of order and beastly places that animals claim apart from them (Philo/Wilbert 2000). Concretely, this paper focuses on the everyday negotiations of animal welfare activists with the dogs’ agentive mobilities, and the activists' struggles to grant these liminal urban agents a dedicated and safe space in the urban environment.