Infrastructuring multispecies encounters: an ethnography of more-than-human urban assemblages in Berlin's petting zoos

• Applicant: Dr. Santiago Orrego
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 510962102

This project will analyze the presence of nonhuman animals as active elements participating in the assemblage and stabilization of a relatively new space of human-nonhuman relationships in European cities: the petting zoo. It aims to describe how urban public spaces are reassembled and re-signified as infrastructures for encounters between humans and animals. The research will pay particular attention to petting zoos as infrastructures of human-animal encounters in the city, the urban as a multispecies co-production, as well as the ethical and political underpinnings of urban spaces designed for human-animal interactions. Concretely, the project entails pursuing ethnographic research in two such multispecies locations: the Kinderbauernhof Knirpsenfarm and the Tierpark Neukölln. Three are its main objectives:(1) to reconstruct the emergence of petting zoos and children's farms as public and free-entry spaces for human-animal encounters in Euro-American cities, particularly in Berlin.(2) to analyze the spatial, infrastructural, and organizational set-up of two petting zoos/children's farms in Berlin.(3) To document the situated practices and imaginaries articulating concrete encounters between humans and animals at these locations.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position