In this research, I bridge animal geographies with perspectives on a feminist ethics of care (Gilligan, 1982; Donovan, 1994; Adams, 1995), intimacy (Gillespie, 2017), entangled empathy (Gruen, 2015), and impurity (Shotwell, 2016) to cultivate, what I call, a contextual ethics of care as part of a feminist animal geography. I ground this analysis in a case study of multispecies participant observation at live cow auctions in Ontario, Canada, demonstrating a contextual ethics of care as methodological practice. Through this practice, I investigate how animals endure and respond to violence in their encounters with humans. Just as importantly, I show how a contextual ethics of care offers insight for understanding human—animal ontology and makes the emotional and ethical discomfort of investigating animal violence a part of the research process, helping scholars occupy and navigate unethical spaces to exercise care for animals in varied and dynamic ways.
Mots clés : feminist animal geography|ethics of care|violence|multispecies ethnography|cow agency and subjectivity
A103137MC