ABSTRACT
The challenges of studying everyday encounters are complicated further when they involve relationships across species boundaries. Nonhuman actions and interactions entail movement – or its notable absence – in ways humans often find fleeting, unpredictable or spatially less intelligible (e.g. too subtle, too extensive, too microscopic). They also involve communication fundamentally centred beyond linguistic realms on bodily expression and interpretation, spanning a wide range of sensory hierarchies and complex affective dynamics. To methodologically take seriously the fleshy, mobile co-agency and intersubjectivity of animals, this chapter highlights multispecies ethnography using Point of View (POV) techniques of mobile video ethnography (MVE). Pulling from the mundane, everyday and taken-for-granted practice of dogwalking in the United Kingdom, the author investigates modes of articulation and response made available through wearable cameras in the intimate body spaces and movements of animals and humans through mobile ethnographic encounters. Ultimately, she argues that wearable video cameras open up new possibilities for animals to “speak” in their own registers and for generating audiovisual traces that seriously consider how humans and animals come into being through specific mobilities and ecologies.
