Outputs

ROH-Indies Working Paper 1: The recent years have seen much controversy around street dogs in India, with increasingly polarised debate in public platforms about their impacts on human health and wellbeing, and about how they should be controlled or managed. ROH-Indies has been investigating the intersections between people, street dogs, and health to understand why there is so much polarisation despite a vast corpus of knowledge on rabies and its prevention, and on dog management. Our ongoing research suggests that achieving health at the society-street dog interface requires a fundamental shift in approach that takes into account the multidimensionality and the contextuality of people-street dog interactions.
Authors: Srinivasan, K., Rubio-Ramon, G., Ramp, D., Chapple, R.
Date of publication: 2024

Dogs are our constant companions: models of loyalty and unconditional love for millions around the world. But these beloved animals are much more than just our pets – and our shared history is far richer and more complex than you might assume. Historian Chris Pearson reveals how the shifting fortunes of dogs hold a mirror to our changing society, from the evolution of breeding standards to the fight for animal rights. Wherever humans have gone, dogs have followed, changing size, appearance and even jobs along the way – from the forests of medieval Europe, where greyhounds chased down game for royalty, to the frontlines of twentieth-century conflicts, where dogs carried messages and hauled gun carriages. Despite vast social change, however, the power of the human-canine bond has never diminished. By turns charming, thought-provoking and surprising, Collared reveals the fascinating tale of how we made the modern dog.
Author: Pearson, C.
Date of publication: 2024

This piece introduces a special issue tackling the theme of ‘animal geographies at the limits’. An opening section argues that work on ‘animal geography’ in its older zoogeographical guise, but with suggestions of a growing interest in human-animal relations, has long been a feature of the Scottish Geographical Journal. It continues by outlining the background to the current special issue, explaining what the guest editors understand by the ‘limits’ of (now-not-so-) ‘new animal geographies’ as a subfield rooted in academic human geography but with many interdisciplinary connections. It concludes by mapping across from the limits that we have identified into the contributions that follow.
Authors: Philo, C., Srinivasan, K., Rubio Ramon, G.
Date of publication: 2024

Through a bibliometric analysis of journal articles in Anglophone animal geographies (as a subdiscipline of human geography), we examine the intersections between citational trends, the contours of knowledge in the field and everyday academic lives. Our goal in this paper is to highlight some of the ways in which citational inequities are fueled. Specifically, our analysis shows that within Anglophone animal geographies, citational esteem can accrue through institutional networks and shared onto-epistemologies, which often go along with ethical and political orientations that refrain from explicitly contesting the status-quo of anthropocentrism. Scottish Geographical Journal.
Authors: Kathryn, Krithika, Rosemary
Date of publication: 2024

This Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers paper examines the possibilities for nature in contemporary times through a ground-up investigation of nature practices in Chennai, India. It navigates dissonant strands of scholarship on the promise of urban regions as sites of exemplary social natures with an analytical framework that examines how autonomous nonhuman life in Chennai is variously enabled and inhibited. By studying a breadth of natures and nature practices within this urban site (instead of focusing on a particular species or habitat), the paper illuminates the socio-material processes that undermine some natures even while supporting others, highlighting paradoxical responses to nonhuman agencies and resilience within the domain of ecological concern. The simultaneous analysis of Chennai’s abundant and diminishing natures explains dissonances in urban natures scholarship, while offering fresh insights on more equitable approaches to nonhuman nature in human-dominated landscapes. Specifically, it points to the value of reconfiguring concepts and practices of nature, both within and beyond conservation, in ways that are attentive to the plural forms of nonhuman flourishing and experiential vulnerability. Any meaningful prospect for more-than-human futures in urbanising worlds, the paper argues, rests not on biopolitical conservation that seeks to reproduce the past or build future ecologies of ‘legitimate’ natures, but on desisting from the displacement of, and re-allowing room – conceptual, material and ethical – for already existing natures, whether scientifically valued or unintentional, whether imperilled or flourishing.
Author: Srinivasan, K.
Date of publication: 2024

In this Palgrave Communications article, we reflect on the institutional and everyday realities of people-street dog relations in India to develop a case for decolonised approaches to rabies and other zoonoses.
Authors: Srinivasan, K., Kurz, T., Kuttava, P., and Pearson, C.
Date of publication: 2019

This Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers paper examines the socio-legal and everyday moral geographies of human cohabitation with free-living dogs in India to think through what is implicated in living with nonhuman difference on a planet where the social and the natural are inextricably entangled. It investigates the contours of canine cosmopolitanism in Chennai city and theorises street dogs as unintentional natures to problematise dominant ideas about valued and pestilent nonhuman life, drawing out implications for biodiversity conservation and other more-than-humanisms. Through these analyses, the paper transgresses the silos of domestic/wild and biodiversity conservation/animal protection to advance scholarship on the politics of (non)dualism and offers thought experiments on making and maintaining more-than-human society in contemporary times.
Author: Srinivasan, K.
Date of publication: 2019

Author: Srinivasan, K.
Date of publication: 2018

This article in Past & Present, traces the policing of stray dogs in Paris from the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War.
Author: Pearson, C.
Date of publication: 2017

Author: Srinivasan K.
Date of publication: 2015

Vallena, composed in the South Indian classical Carnatic tradition and set in a contemporary arrangement, explores the intricacies of everyday interactions between people and street dogs and the age-old challenge of interspecies understanding, Vallena is the first song produced by Carnatic musician and songwriter, Ragavan Manian, for ROH Indies as part of our collaboration, Raags for Dogs. Learn more about this public engagement collaboration here.

Season 7 of The Animal Turn focuses on “Animals and Multispecies Health.” Claudia Hirtenfelder talks to geographers, historians, ecologists, and anthropologists about multispecies health. This includes talking about everything healthy publics, to compassionate conservation, species story, behavioral ecology, and Pavlov’s dogs. ROH-Indies researchers Prof. Krithika Srinivasan, Dr Daniel Ramp, Dr Rosalie Chapples, Dr Heeral Chhabra, and Dr Guillem Rubio Ramon participate in different episodes of this season. PhD students from the project, Priya Thaplyial and Rashmi Singh Rana, contributed to the animal highlights section in various episodes of this season as well.

Season 6, Episode 8. Krithika Srinivasan joins Claudia on the show to talk about re-animalization, a concept that challenges the dominant ways in which human wellbeing are framed. Re-Animalization compels one to think about how development is predicated on logics of protection and sacrifice, expanding notions of longevity, and a reduction of risk. Re-Animalization offers an opportunity to shift our gaze to the most privileged and to consider how risks might be more evenly distributed.

Sreyashi Ray is an illustrator and PhD student in South Asian Literatures at the University of Minnesota. She researchs and paints postcolonial/vernacular animals and environments. She is the author of Forced Renegades: Interspecies Relationalities, Historiographic Violence, and Zoopolitical Realism in Mahasweta Devi’s “The Death of Jagamohan” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021.

Most people in Anglo-Euro-American regions know dogs only as pets or working animals or as under some kind of human ownership. Dogs outside of human property regimes tend to be seen as ‘stray’ and as needing either ‘rescue’ or ‘control’. ROH Indies runs against the grain of this conceptualisation of dogs, and engages with street dogs as autonomous, free-living animals. Our first task, then, was to find ways of making visible these other canine possibilities – of showing what the lives of these nonhuman co-residents of human settlements might look like. We commissioned Chennai-based photographer, Eshita Prasanna, to help us with this. The images used on this site are all by Eshita and portray some of the city’s free-living dogs, and the ways in which they come into interaction with their human cohabitants.

Season 3, Episode 4. Claudia Hirtenfelder talks to Krithika Srinivasan about the concept of biopolitics and how it could be used to understand multi-species urban relations. They touch on the tensions between harm and welfare as well as how different socio-biological tactics are enforced in the name of urban development.

A discussion of Krithika’s article ‘Remaking more‐than‐human society: Thought experiments on street dogs as “nature”’ which appeared in the journal ‘Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers’ in 2019.

Srinivasan, K. (2025) Chennai: Expert says relocation of dogs to protect turtles would worsen situation

(2024) நாய்கள் துரத்தினால் நீங்கள் உடனே செய்ய வேண்டியவை இவைதான் (What you need to do if chased by dogs)

Reddy, S. (2024) Paws and reflect. 

Oppili, P. (2024) Beyond Vaccines: Rethinking Stray Dog Control for Safer Communities.

Delgado, S. (2024) Turkey’s plan to remove stray dogs is inhumane. There’s a better way.

Srimathi, G. (2024) Man vs Dog: twisted tales of an abiding companionship.

Kaveri, M. (2020) Push for native Indian dog breeds: Experts demand govt effort and caution.

Krithika appears in this BBC programme about the impact of dogs on humans and vice versa. Brett Westwood visits Battersea to meet the animals whose history is most inextricably linked with our own. As the first domestic animals, dogs made it possible for humans to spread into the areas of the world that they did, to eat more protein and to take up activities from hunting to sledding. But it was only in the Victorian period that the dogs we know today were “invented”, by breeding. And throughout all of this dogs have also been changing human lives as companions.

Traub, A. (2016) In defence of the dogs and crows.

The article argues that sensationalized news stories about dog attacks and negative interactions between humans and free-living dogs do not represent the reality of most human-dog relationships. The authors propose a more nuanced approach that takes into account the local context, suggesting measures such as better public education about dog safety.
Authors: Dasarathy, A., Srinivasan, K.
Date of publication: 2024

The adjectives of healthy and green often go hand in hand with new urban development strategies worldwide. This raises fundamental questions for cities in simultaneous processes of de-greening/de-animalization and greening: what is the “green” or urban nature that these programs refer to? Who or what benefits from these interventions? And what natures, on the contrary, are seen as obstacles to them?
Authors: Rubio-Ramon, G., Srinivasan, K.
Date of publication: 2024

Read in the BBC History Magazine.
Author: Pearson, C.
Date of publication: 2024

Read in the Big Issue.
Author: Pearson, C.
Date of publication: 2024

The predominant approach of protecting or restoring floral and faunal life after harming, displacing, or destroying them in service of human interests does not hold much promise for nature on Earth in the age of the Anthropocene. Such approaches fail to address the ethical and political-economic cores of what tend to be presented as techno-scientific or ecological problems. If the planet is to remain home to life beyond the human, mainstream human societies need to rethink their place, role, and entitlements on Earth, and relearn to cohabit with human and nonhuman others, even in the face of risk and uncertainty.
Authors: Srinivasan, K., and Collard, R.
Date of publication: 2023

What can India’s free-living dogs teach us about sharing the planet with other creatures?
Authors: Srinivasan, K. and Pearson, C.
Date of publication: 2023

Are the British a nation of dog lovers? A piece on how Britain’s love for puppies and pooches has always been conditional, now and historically.
Author: Pearson, C.
Date of publication: 2022

There is widespread acknowledgement that modern human lifestyles (from the time of settled agriculture) have adversely impacted the planet and the non-human creatures that inhabit it, compromising the capacity of the biosphere to support life as currently exists. One aspect of these adverse impacts is biodiversity loss, through both direct eradication of flora and fauna, and habitat loss following diversion to development activities such as settlement, agriculture, mining and factories. The field of biodiversity and wildlife conservation has emerged in response, but comes under sustained criticism for social impacts associated with conservation interventions.
Author: Srinivasan, K.
Date of Publication: 2021

Why does India, despite more than a hundred years of government-led dog control efforts, continue to witness to recurring debates on these decidedly serious issues? We think the public health risks of bites and rabies associated with dogs continue to be ongoing problems because of the prevalence of an incomplete and flawed understanding of street dogs, their interactions with people, and the risks that may emerge from these interactions.
Authors: Srinivasan, K., Rao, S., Kasturirangan, R.
Date of publication: 2015

Dogs are just one element of a complex set of factors that result in bites and rabies. Therefore, these public health risks cannot be addressed by controlling dogs alone, but require a multipronged approach that must incorporate other elements.
Authors: Srinivasan, K., Rao, S.
Date of publication: 2015