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Paper short abstract:

Since 2019, Beirut, Lebanon has faced a socio-economic collapse and escalating political violence. Amid these precarious conditions, I examine practices of care between urban inhabitants and street cats. I argue that these multispecies relationships reveal an alternative way of living with crisis.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2019, the population of Beirut, Lebanon has faced a socio-economic collapse compounded by one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. My research considers how ordinary people make life possible amid such precarious conditions. Specifically, I study care-giving practices between urban residents and the hundreds of stray cats that live in Beirut. I draw on ethnographic data to examine the voluntary and dispersed acts of feeding that urban inhabitants undertake to care for the street cats, which are neglected by government institutions.

In my paper, I argue that these practices of multispecies care point to cracks in the city’s landscape and in its deadened atmosphere. By “crack,” I mean gaps or openings within the monolithic systems of power that pervade our lives. These cracks are small spaces of alterity where humans and animals relate with and care for one another, and where the city is used and occupied in different ways. For example, cat-feeders forge their own paths through the city and build feeding stations in spaces that are convenient to them. In a city that is overwhelmingly privatized and securitized, cat-feeders strive to create shared space with the stray cats; they create an alternative version of the city.

In sum, I argue that the cat-feeders’ relationships with the cats point to an alternative way of living life and occupying space within Beirut’s dystopian reality. My paper ends by reflecting on what the cat-feeders of Beirut may teach us about how to live with crisis.