Session: 5h
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 11.30–13.00
Room: JK15a 1.01
Chair: Neha Vora
Panel description: This panel puts migration studies into conversation with multispecies approaches, asking how attention to human–nonhuman entanglements can help decolonize the field, expand its epistemic horizons, and foster solidarities across borders. While migration studies have illuminated the intensification of displacement, bordering, and racialized precarity under global capitalism, their frameworks often remain tethered to Eurocentric, state-centric, and human exceptionalist logics. Meanwhile, multispecies ethnography has foregrounded how plants, animals, fungi, and other beings move, adapt, and co-produce worlds alongside humans—challenging dominant narratives of mobility and belonging. By placing these literatures in dialog, we seek to rethink how movement is conceptualized, whose mobilities are rendered visible, and how shared trajectories across species are shaped by colonial histories and contemporary inequalities.
The panel will bring together scholars whose work engages with communities and environments in which migration is experienced as inherently multispecies: from animal companions crossing borders with migrants, to animal voluntourism, to the entangled mobilities of plants and people in transnational migrant networks amidst climate change, to activist and care practices that forge alternative kinships across species. Our guiding questions include: how do infrastructures of mobility (transport systems, securitized borders, tourism, surveillance, markets) govern multispecies lives? How do race, class, gender, and coloniality shape not only human migration but also its multispecies dimensions? What affordances do plants and animals have in these contexts? In other words, how do they affect, shape and resist human intentions and designs? What solidarities, forms of care, and activist practices emerge when migration is reframed beyond the human?
This panel offers an anthropological take on the migratory mobilities of humans and nonhumans that lay bare the Eurocentric and anthropocentric biases situated in institutions and people alike—opening space for epistemic innovation and for imagining multispecies futures of dignity and coexistence.
Neha Vora (American University of Sharjah), “Pets in Motion: Transnational Adoption, Commodification, and Nonhuman Politics of Mobility in the Gulf”
Abstract: This paper examines the transnational circulations of nonhuman animals in and through the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on how pet life in the United Arab Emirates is shaped by overlapping ecologies of mobility, commodification, and care. While migration to the Gulf has typically been narrated through frameworks of labor extraction and economic precarity, I foreground the parallel and intersecting movements of animals—particularly cats—to complicate dominant accounts of migration.
Animals enter and exit the UAE through diverse pathways: as companions accompanying migrants, as high-value commodities produced by international breeders, as feral ship stowaways who have become urban residents, and as “rescued” beings exported abroad for imagined better lives. The Arabian Mau exemplifies these layered trajectories—once dismissed as a local stray, it is now rebranded as a valuable commodity breed in Europe. At the same time, transnational rescue networks, often driven by Western imaginaries of “proper” animal care, reproduce hierarchies of value that echo colonial and classed assumptions about the Global South.
Through ethnographic research with rescuers, veterinarians, and pet owners in the UAE, I show how animals become entangled in both global consumer cultures—pet cafés, boutique breeders, luxury services—and in community-based care practices that contest abandonment and precarity. By tracing these multispecies mobilities, the paper highlights how animals unsettle dominant narratives of migration, exposing uneven landscapes of value, care, and vulnerability while also raising questions about solidarity, justice, and the nonhuman politics of mobility in the Gulf and beyond.
Bio: Neha Vora is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of International Studies at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Her research and teaching interests include diasporas and migration, citizenship, globalized higher education, gender, liberalism, political economy, and human-nonhuman encounters, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula region. She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford University Press, 2018). Her current research project approaches Dubai and other UAE cities as sites of entangled precarities between humans and nonhumans, paying particular attention to informal stray cat care by immigrants and the place-making practices of cats themselves.
Rachel Lewis (George Mason University), “Feline Animacies: Multispecies Ecologies of Desire and Belonging in Skiathos”
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between tourism and animal welfare in Greece. While tourism is typically conceptualized in terms of human infrastructures of mobility, commodification and desire, I seek to examine the impact of tourism on interspecies care and solidarity in the Greek island of Skiathos. Through feminist multispecies ethnographic research and participant observation at Skiathos Cats Welfare Association, I discuss how pleasure and desire—both for cats and for Skiathos—drives migration to and from the island. In Skiathos, romantic and intimate encounters between tourist volunteers and permanent residents are frequently mediated via the social world of cat culture. However, while tourists and volunteers often arrive in Skiathos with neocolonial and capitalist assumptions about the need for the domestication of street cat populations in Greece, their perceptions are repeatedly challenged in the face of the complexities of feline agency with which they are confronted. By contesting neoliberal narratives of pet ownership and animal rescue, I discuss the extent to which feline animacies can function as a form of decolonial pedagogy, one that encourages us to view tourism in terms of the preservation of multispecies habitats and that teaches us how to better acknowledge the land rights of all beings.
Jessica Maufort (Université libre de Bruxelles), “Trespassing Territories: Boundaries and Multispecies Co-habitation in Canadian and Māori Fiction”
Abstract: This paper compares the different approaches to multispecies resilience, co-existence, and solidarity deployed in Fifteen Dogs (2015) by Canadian writer André Alexis and Sky Dancer (2003) by Māori writer Witi Ihimaera. Both works blur the lines between human and animal species, albeit from different angles: Alexis’ novel follows the fate of fifteen dogs which two gods endow with “human intelligence” as a way to test the latter’s link with happiness. In Ihimaera’s Sky Dancer, two human protagonists transform into birds. They then travel back to the creation of Aotearoa New Zealand in order to assist the landbirds in their fight against an invasion by voracious seabirds. At first glance, comparing these two works may seem futile: Alexis resorts to the apologue, a moral fable featuring anthropomorphised animals, and explores issues of animal sentience, self-consciousness, and communication skills. Such philosophical reflections about animal and human “natures” are almost absent from Ihimaera’s plot-driven novel. Combining elements from magic realism, science fiction, Māori creation stories, and the Bible, this adventure story deals with both natural and cultural/social endangerment, such as birds’ extinction, deforestation, limited Māori land sovereignty, and substance abuse. Yet, despite their narratological/aesthetic, thematic, and cultural differences, these two novels help us nuance our understanding of species boundaries. While they shed light on animals and humans as “companion species” bound in co-constitutive, co-emerging kinship relations (Haraway), such inter- and intra-species co-habitation also implies respecting some delimitations of roles and territories. Alexis and Ihimaera remind us that effective cross-species communication and solidarity need not dismiss the “boundary” concept. In doing so, the authors resist any simplistic, utopian vision of a multispecies biosphere devoid of borders, structure, and conflict. In Fifteen Dogs and Sky Dancer, humans and more-than-humans may trespass on the layers of contact zones just enough to dispel rigid hierarchies and to spark a multispecies ethics of care that engages with limits and each species’ “significant otherness” (Haraway).
Bio: Jessica Maufort is a Lecturer at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. She specialises in postcolonial ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and magic realism, examined in Indigenous and non-Indigenous fiction from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Canada. Related research interests include trauma and affect studies, zoocriticism, material ecocriticism, ecospirituality, and econarratology. Jessica recently co-edited a volume on post-apartheid South African drama (Brill, 2020), a two-part special issue on “New Scholarship” in The Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies (2021), and a special issue on “Voicing Absences/Presences in a Damaged World” in English Text Construction (2022).