As the year comes to an end, I’m delighted to share that my new paper, Partial Encounters: Exploring More-Than-Human Entanglements in Berlin’s Animal Enclosures, has just been published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (SAGE, 2024).
The article emerges from my DFG-funded project “Infrastructuring Multispecies Encounters”, in which I explored the everyday relations that take shape around petting zoos, animal shelters, and other urban enclosures in Berlin.
Rather than focusing on the spectacular or the exotic, Partial Encounters traces the subtle negotiations through which humans, animals, and infrastructures meet, touch, and occasionally misunderstand one another. It asks how fences, feeding routines, and gestures of care mediate intimacy and distance—how they produce forms of contact that are never complete, but always partial.
By foregrounding incompleteness as a condition of coexistence, the paper contributes to current debates in multispecies ethnography and the sociology of care. It argues that attention to partiality—to the fleeting, fragmented, and often awkward relations that compose everyday human-animal life—can help rethink what counts as encounter, care, or ethics in urban environments.
This publication opens a first cycle of fieldwork and writing that began in Berlin’s animal enclosures and continues to inform my ongoing reflections on alterecological ethnography.
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), project: Infrastructuring Multispecies Encounters.