Remaking More-than-Human Society: Thought Experiments on Street Dogs as ‘Nature.’

This 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.