Creating Cats and Society – A Website Exploring Cat Education, Advocacy, and Community

• In Event: Animals from a Sociological Perspective Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 1: Interspecies Communities

Abstract

This presentation shares my experiences developing a cats and society website exploring education, advocacy and community. Building on a two-year grant project documenting the emergence of adoption-centered cat cafés, I initially incorporated interviews and photos from ten on-site, field research cat café visits within and outside the United States including Salt Lake City, San Diego, Philadelphia, Denver, Phoenix, Savannah; Perry, Georgia; Reykjavik, Iceland; Ghent, Belgium; and Athens, Greece. Following up on a suggestion from my long-term collaborator, Kate Benjamin, I decided to add another section of teaching materials from my ten years of teaching a Cats in Society class at Westminster University along with a third section featuring ongoing conversations, interviews, and podcasts with people in the cat rescue community including, among others, Christopher Watson and Judith at De Poezenboot. Developing this website, still in progress, allows me to communicate the sociological research on cats in society to a larger audience; highlights the work and stories of people in the cat rescue and shelter community; and is a way for me to share educational resources for academics who are interested in teaching classes on cats in society. Furthermore, it highlights the ways in which academic work can be communicated using various forms of multimedia including, among others, interviews, photographs, audio and video clips while also demonstrating the connections between academia and the larger community of people both within and outside the United States who love and care for cats. As a sociologist who is also part of the cat rescue community, I am in a unique position to describe and document changes within the cat rescue and shelter communities while highlighting the sociological significance of “why this matters” and “what this tell us” about the future of cat rescue and shelter movements.

Author

• Kristjane Nordmeyer, Westminster University