Dog-Child Stories From La Paz, Bolivia

• In Event: Common World Pedagogies for the Anthropocene: A More-Than-Human Take on Environmental Education-as-Collective Action

Abstract

In this presentation, I offer a visual narrative of children’s relations with street dogs in the slums of La Pez, Bolivia. The objective is to reveal the complexity of these relationships and to consider how we might think about them beyond the binaries of wild and threatening or safe and domesticated relations.

I theorize these La Paz street dog-child relations by drawing upon Donna Haraway’s notions of companion species (2008) and of ‘making kin’ (2015). Haraway’s work allows us to understand the ‘significant otherness’ of human-dog relations because of our closely entangled histories, presents and futures. Like Haraway, I am interested in tracing the mortally entangled lives of real dogs and real children, in this case in La Pez.

Using photographs provided by children, I build up multi-layered visual stories that illustrate the complex specificities of these particular children’s and dogs’ lives. Through the images, and the children’s stories about them, I explore the extent to which these real-life relations exceed the traditional child-dog roles and relationships popularized in western cultural narratives, and call for a reconsideration of what constitutes flourishing multispecies cohabitations in this non-western context.


These visual narratives of the complexly entangled lives and relations between children and street dogs in the slums of La Paz challenge privileged ‘anthropo-centric’ as well as romantic ‘western-centric’, and sanitized ‘class-centric’ understandings of the bounds of child-dog relations.

Author

• Karen Malone, University of Western Sydney