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Event details of Prosthetic Species: Security Dogs and the More-than-Human Sensing of Urban Danger
Date
10 February 2023
Time
15:00 -17:00

To register: L.Kopitz@uva.nl

Focusing on human-dog relations, this article develops a more-than-human approach to the sensing of urban insecurity. Extending work on the embodied, sensory dimension of fear and other security affects, it centers the role of non-human, canine bodies in processes of risk assessment. Drawing on research in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how a range of city-dwellers learn to sense danger with and through security dogs. How do those who live and work in the city construct and experience its threats through attunement to their dogs’ olfactory, auditory and visual acuity? And how does this interspecies sensing of urban danger co-produce and configure distributions of urban safety and precarity? In this context, I suggest, dogs are not only a companion species but also a “prosthetic species”, animals that enhance and extend the limits of the human senses, enabling a more-than-human knowledge of what threats look, sound and smell like. I discuss such practices of interspecies sensing and their effects, concentrating on the identification of criminal, political and spiritual forms of danger. Together, such instances of interspecies sensing can provide new insights into the everyday perception, construction and negotiation of fearful cityscapes.

Rivke Jaffe is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam. Connecting geography, anthropology and cultural studies, her research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political. She is specifically interested in how urban inequalities are mediated, reproduced and transformed in more-than-human ways, by nonhuman entities from digital technologies to animals. Her current work studies security dogs in Kingston, Jamaica.

Preparatory reading

- de Bondt, Herre, and Rivke Jaffe. “Rats and Sewers: Urban Modernity Beyond the Human.” Roadsides 8 (2022): 65-71. https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-202200810.

- Barua, Maan, and Anindya Sinha. “Cultivated, Feral, Wild: The Urban as an Ecological Formation.” Urban Geography (2022): 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2022.2055924.