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Abstract

This paper proposes a change in the conceptualisation of home, as part of a wider paradigmatic transformation in the understandings of the boundaries between humans and animals, and nature and culture. A new concept of multispecies homescapes is suggested, building on recent work on human–animal relationships as well as writings on the home in human geography. Multispecies homescapes are approached as imaginary spaces, including experiences of sharing home with other species, the limits and liminalities of homeness, and the loss of a multispecies home. Imagining home as multispecies will widen the scope of research beyond anthropocentric understandings of domestic space.

Keywords

animal geographies domesticities home multispecies studies spatial imaginaries

I Introduction

Everyday routines and practices are fundamental for the creation and maintenance of relations that constitute home life, yet they often remain invisible. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, people around the world spent considerable amounts of time at home, revealing the significance of home as the bedrock of societal functioning and, at the same time, the complexity of how its meaning becomes and transforms. In an unprecedented way, staying at home and working from home became experiences not only widely shared but, importantly, reflected on. People enjoyed, suffered, became bored, had children, divorced, changed jobs, and moved to other locations. People also invested in their personal wellbeing at home in various ways, among other things by acquiring an animal companion, to cope with the isolation and the need for sharing the home space with other beings. In many countries, the demand for pets expanded dramatically during the pandemic, including an increase in the provision of homes for rescue animals (Morgan et al., 2020). For academic inquiry, the sudden visibility of the home has emphasised the need to recognise the significance of the home, as a physical space as well as an imaginary one, and its intertwining with the nonhuman world.

In this paper, I propose a change in the conceptualisation of home from a human-only space to a multispecies one. The suggested shift in focus follows from the wider paradigmatic transformation in the scientific understandings of the conceptual boundaries and their crossings between humans and animals, and nature and culture. The aim is to conceptualise the co-production of domestic space by humans and animals and the multispecies spatiality of homeness, that is, what is understood as homelike. Especially, I see a central role for geography in developing the study of the home to include other species and thereby widen the scope of research beyond anthropocentric understandings of the home, ultimately transforming what a home is understood to be in human geography. I introduce the new concept of multispecies homescapes, building on recent work on relationships between humans and animals as well as writings on the home. The purpose of this paper is to further discussion on the home as a space that is never solely inhabited by humans only but always shared with different others whose agencies contribute to what a home is (Hitchings, 2004). In the field of animal geographies, the concept of multispecies homescapes will serve as a tool for examining the human–animal relationship within the home, the space of the most mundane encounters and co-living between humans and animals.

Multispecies homescapes consist of physical spaces such as houses, flats, gardens and their surroundings, objects and bodies as well as neighbourhoods, towns, and countries. Apart from physical spaces, multispecies homescapes can be approached as imaginary spaces (Watkins, 2015), including experiences, memories, and expectations of living with other species, as well as everyday encounters and practices shared with them. Multispecies homescapes are spaces that are felt like home, treated as home, and inhabited in the sense of being at home with animals, both wild and domestic, whether they be the family cat, the guide dog, the hedgehog in the garden, or one that is not welcome to the home, like the wasp in the living room. Within this spatial conceptualisation, I discuss the temporal process of becoming-home, the ways in which domestic spaces are co-produced as home over time, through shared encounters, interactions, and relationships between humans and animals. My specific focus is on human–animal relationality, while at the same time acknowledging that homes are created and experienced in a broad multispecies collaboration, also including plants and fungi.

Since the 1990s, there has been a rapidly increasing interest in the study of human–animal relations and the position of animals in the human-dominated world, resulting in the development of the sub-fields of animal, critical animal, and more-than-human geographies (e.g. Buller, 2014; Gillespie and Collard, 2015; Greenhough, 2014), alongside the interdisciplinary field of human–animal studies (Shapiro, 2020).

Cresswell (2015: 93) argues that home as a concept ‘lies right at the heart of human geography’. As noted by Larson (2021: 453), however, geography has largely understood home ‘as a fundamental aspect of being human’. The homes that humans co-create and share with animal companions of different kind have mostly remained in the sidelines of academic inquiry. The omission of other species has positioned the study of home as anthropocentric and thereby severely restricted theoretical discussion as well as empirical inquiry of the home, the space that is, after all, most familiar to most of us. In other words, what a home is cannot be separated from who are at home.

The question of multispecies homes has only recently been the focus of the geographical research of human–animal relations or the home, conceptualising the home as a multispecies space that is not essentially human but shared between and co-shaped by humans and animals, wild and domestic, in ways that are only somewhat controlled or managed by humans. There are studies on ‘posthuman’ families including nonhuman members, constituted through relations at home (e.g. Charles, 2016). Yet, as a spatial, relational, and material phenomenon, home cannot be equalled to family, and the concepts have slightly different contents and uses.

There are reasons why the multispecies character of the home may have eluded the attention of geographical scrutiny. Animals cohabiting with humans may be too close to be considered part of nature, at the same time as they are too far to be seen as belonging to the realm of culture (Franklin, 1999). Yet, it is in the home that the working of the boundary between nature and culture begins, in the constant management of encounters and relationships with other species. Therefore, homes could be understood as an integral part of multispecies life, as lived biocultural diversity (Elands et al., 2019) consisting of daily experiences and practices of interspecies interactions. As scientific knowledge of other species is proliferating in an unparalleled rate, our relations with them are revealed to be more problematic than ever before. Therefore, the homes we share with our fellow animals call scholarly attention and recognition, whether at the scale of the household or the planet.

The remainder of the paper is divided in two sections and a conclusion. In the first one, I outline earlier work in some research areas that are central to the development of the concept of multispecies homescapes: geographies of the home, animal geographies, multispecies ethnography, domesticities, and decolonisation. In the second, I present three possible perspectives for exploring multispecies homescapes in different contexts.

II Home, space, and interspecies relationality

1 Geographies of the home

The home, as a concept, is ambiguous: it is the physical site of dwelling, the house-as-home, hometown, or homeland as well as the feeling of being at home (Benjamin, 1995; Douglas, 1991). Tuan (1975) describes home as the nurturing shelter that protects life; in a similar vein, the concept homescape by Porteous (1990/2019) is a metaphor for a landscape that feels like home and is constructed on experiences and memories as well as on the affective qualities of the physical environment. These positive notions have been criticised by feminist geographers, pointing out that the private sphere has tied women to domestic work and exposed them to violence, while the public sphere has been reserved for men doing paid work (Massey, 1992).

In the early 2000s, the study of the home attained increasing interest within cultural geography and related disciplines (e.g. Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Duncan and Lambert, 2004). A new journal titled Home Cultures was launched in 2004, with topics such as material cultures, identities, and segregation, illustrating the ways in which scholars of the home now ‘unsettled ideas about home and domesticity’ (Blunt, 2005a). It was noted how the boundary between public and private in the home was blurred, epitomised by the increasing popularity of doing full-time paid work from home (Dowling and Power, 2013). Further studies revealed, for example, how the perceived safety of the home was challenged by environmental hazards such as flooding (Willis, 2022).

Mapping the landscape of home geographies, Blunt and Varley (2004: 3) noted that ‘[a]s a space of belonging and alienation, intimacy and violence, desire and fear, the home is invested with meanings, emotions, experiences and relationships that lie at the heart of human life’. What was missing from this description was the multispecies nature of these relationships. The special issue on ‘Animals and the Home’ published in Home Cultures in 2021 aims to fill this gap and ‘interrogate the shifting relationship between animals and ideas of home, and consider home as a lived, inter-species experience across time and space’ (Hamlett and Strange, 2021).

2 Animal geographies

During the past 10 years, the progress of the subfield of animal geographies since the first calls to ‘bring the animals back in’ to geography (Wolch and Emel, 1995; see also Philo and Wilbert, 2000) has been regularly followed in this journal. In the first of these reports, Buller (2014) emphasises the situatedness of human–animal encounters and relationships as well as the agencies and subjectivities of animals as living beings, questions which have featured centrally in research within animal geographies. Buller’s second report focuses on methodology: the innovative ideas introduced to further the effort at understanding human–animal relationality (Buller, 2015). In his third and last article, Buller (2016) considers the ethics of animal geography, suggesting a moral community that would include animals as subjects.

Buller’s work is continued by Hovorka, also with three consecutive reports. In the first one, Hovorka (2017) focuses on globalising and decolonising, turning attention to the diversities and pluralities that become visible when human–animal relations are understood as situated, something which is necessary for recognising the global perspectives of animal geographies. In her next article on hybridising, Hovorka (2018) encourages animal geographers to engage with other sub-disciplines within geography and other disciplines discussing human–animal relationality. Finally, Hovorka (2019) considers questions concerning power dynamics between humans and various groups of animals, within complex multispecies hierarchical networks.

More recent developments in animal geographies are examined by (Gibbs, 2020) in an overview of current empirical, conceptual, and methodological work. In this first article, Gibbs emphasises the need for placing animals and their experiences centrally in research and suggests ways for expanding the scope of the subfield. In a second report, (Gibbs, 2021) focuses specifically on killing and caring, the two practices that, to a large extent, define human relations with animals.

3 Multispecies ethnography

Since the early 2010s, animal geographers and other scholars have expressed the need to develop methods that would consider the animals themselves in research, in their embodied encounters with humans in which they act together and share everyday life with them (e.g. Buller, 2015). This need is further highlighted by the continuous accumulation of scientific evidence pointing to animal consciousness (Shapiro, 2020).

An initiative termed multispecies ethnography was introduced by Kirksey and Helmreich in 2010 and later adopted by several authors (e.g. Dalke and Wels, 2016; Maurstad et al., 2013; Moore and Kosut, 2014; Van Dooren et al., 2016). Originated in anthropology, multispecies ethnography is a methodological approach which focuses on relationships, embodied communication, and interactive agencies between humans and, broadly stated, ‘organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds’ (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010: 545). Multispecies ethnography considers animals ‘embodied individuals sensing and making meaning of their environment and thus legitimate participants in ethnographies of shared lives’ (Tammi et al., 2020), therefore placing animals and their viewpoints at the core of investigation (Wadham, 2021).

Recently, there have been suggestions for expanding the focus of multispecies ethnography. Maderson and Elsner-Adams (2023: 3), for example, note in their study on honey bees that ‘less charismatic, particularly non-mammalian, species are generally underrepresented in multispecies ethnographies’. In a similar vein, Petitt (2023) writes that studies applying multispecies ethnography commonly focus on only two species at a time – one of them being human. She calls for an approach that could ‘explore multispecies relations in a nonbinary way that decenters the human in both data collection and analysis’ (Petitt, 2023: 34–35).

4 Domesticity

Dowling and Power (2013: 290) discuss domesticities as ‘processes and sites through which people create senses of belonging, safety, security and comfort’. Domesticities are produced in different ways, spaces, and scales. They can be understood as the material and embodied practices of making the house as home, focusing on the house itself and the objects within as well as the feelings and experiences of homeyness (Miller, 2001). Domesticities can, however, also be approached as places and practices that represent culture as the opposition of nature and wildness, thereby turning focus to the question of domestication (Dowling and Power, 2013).

The term ‘domestication’, rooted in the word ‘domestic’, refers to the house or household (Cassidy, 2007), highlighting ‘the historic centrality of home – as a place, practice and idea – to domestication’ (Power, 2012: 371). Domestication also refers to the ‘taming’ of spaces and places (Blunt, 2005b) as well as ‘the production of home as a human and “cultured” space’ (Dowling and Power, 2013: 294). Domestication further implies domination, ‘mastery over another being’, which is at the core of human relations to other species (Tuan, 1984: 99).

Studies of domestication as the process by which animals have become part of human domestic life, property, and agricultural production are embodied in the dichotomy of the ‘wild’ and the ‘domestic’. Anderson (1997) points out how, historically, the ideas about domesticating the ‘wild’ were not limited to human–animal relations but extended to power relations among humans, especially to those based on race and gender. Her call for a further consideration of animals in social relations, at the same time easing the rigid dichotomy between ‘civility’ and ‘wildness’, is among the very early ones considering animals in geography, but it also speaks to the subsequent discussion on decolonising geographies.

5 Decolonising

In much of the writing presented above, there is an expressed need to make the voices of animals heard in academic work, echoing the effort at decolonising geography by ‘exposing the ontological violence authorized by Eurocentric epistemologies both in scholarship and everyday life’ (Sundberg, 2014: 34). This process requires attention to the ways in which ‘largely exploitative human relations with nature present in western settings are grounded in nature–society binaries’ (Hovorka, 2017: 388).

These binaries have been addressed in recent posthumanist theorising; however, Sundberg (2013: 34) points to limitations in these writings in that ‘the literature continuously refers to a foundational ontological split between nature and culture as if it is universal’, thus suggesting a decolonising of posthumanist geographies. Further, Hovorka points to the ways in which ‘racial and cultural constructions privileging whiteness inform questions related to the human/animal divide’ (2017: 388; see also Decha, 2012). Thus, the ways in which human–animal relations and animal species are constructed on racial, cultural, and colonial dynamics seriously challenge animal geographies.

Broadly, the aim of decolonising geographies is the increase of ontological and epistemological plurality, including a re-engagement with Indigenous perspectives (Shaw et al., 2006). These have previously been largely excluded from, for example, wildlife management (Nadasdy, 2007). In regard to animals and place more specifically, Wright et al. (2012: 51) suggest a multispecies methodology where ‘human and nonhuman beings can provide shape to research, making certain activities possible or impossible, prompting certain topics of discussion and closing others, generating shared moments and highlighting differences’. Thus, the aim to acknowledge animal subjectivities and agencies in research, one of the central concerns for animal geographies, is supported by decolonisation discussions.

In the next section, I present a selection of recent approaches as to the ways in which multispecies homescapes can be explored in different contexts. I propose three different perspectives for studying multispecies homescapes: first, as shared spaces co-produced by humans and animals; second, as liminal or limited spaces, including boundary crossings; and third, as spaces of loss.

III Three perspectives of multispecies homescapes

1 Multispecies homescapes co-produced as shared spaces

The first perspective concentrates on multispecies domesticities, the experiences of sharing with other species the spaces that are felt like home. It introduces the process of becoming-home between humans and animals, resulting in the production of the imaginary spaces of multispecies homescapes. Here, the focus is on everyday practices and the experiences and feelings of being at home through which humans and animals share and co-shape spatial imaginaries.

Pets are the animals that are most commonly understood to belong to the physical space of the home, where they share everyday life with humans and co-construct relationships with them (Holmberg, 2014, 2015). Fox and Gee (2017; see also Fox, 2018) describe the changes in attitudes and practices concerning pet-keeping since the late 20^th century, analysing the emergence of contemporary pet culture which increasingly integrates animals into the human home and family. They draw attention to the simultaneous development of pet-keeping practices and the surveillance and control of animals’ movements and behaviour in public space, which have led to what they call a culture of ‘responsible’ pet ownership. Power (2008) further demonstrates the agency of animals in shaping the home and the everyday relations taking place between people and dogs as they share their lives in the house-as-home. In these spaces, the ways in which animals are made to ‘embody and perform the material, spatial and temporal ideals framing the domestic’ (Power, 2012: 276) are constantly transformed.

Different kinds of animals may be active agents in their creative ways of using domestic space, not only adjusting to spatial practices in the home but also rearranging them, thus shaping multispecies domesticity. The process of becoming-home with animals is closely connected to the planning and location of the home to best accommodate animals, for example, to avoid the proximity to busy roads (Franklin, 2006), but houses are also modified for the sake of animals. An example is presented by Smith (2003) of the becomings of human–rabbit co-living, in which rabbits are allowed to live freely inside the house, which then leads to extensive modifications of the home space for the use – and further ordering – of the space by rabbits. Such a way of arranging multispecies co-living includes, for example, deciding on what is put out of reach and what is seen as mess and matter out of place (Douglas, 1966). The shared practices and routines and related feelings of home are thus situated in spaces that carry significance in terms of affect and control and shared understandings – or discord – of how the spaces can and should be used.

A multispecies homescape is, however, not limited to the house-as-home or flat but includes physical spaces outside the house. Feeding birds in the garden, for example, takes place at a specific time of day, giving meaning to the garden as a space of interspecies encounters as well as creating a feeling of being connected to nature and contributing to biodiversity (Clark et al., 2019; Cox and Gaston, 2016). Similarly, the popular practice of keeping chicken in urban backyards extends the space of domestic multispecies co-living outside the house-as-home, thus producing alternative urban imaginaries (Blecha and Leitner, 2014). Sometimes the whole neighbourhood becomes a multispecies homescape, as described by Tipper (2011: 161) in her study of children’s relationships with animals: ‘[f]or children, knowing animals was part of knowing humans and a part of experiencing the space of others’ homes or one’s own locality’.

Caring for dogs typically expands the range of shared homemaking practices, routines and rhythms of human–animal encounters, and mundane life. In her article on everyday human/dog routines, Holmberg (2019) demonstrates how interspecies intimacy, experienced through these rhythms and routines, is able to create and transform places, particularly the home. Moreover, negotiations of power pertain spatial practices of human–animal relationality such as dog-walking and visiting dog parks (Fletcher and Platt, 2018). In the dog park, the management and control of dogs can be challenging as – in contrast to the home where human–dog interaction mostly takes place – the dog park is a public space that affects the ways in which ‘people will define appropriate rules for themselves and their dogs’ (Jackson, 2012: 256, see also Urbanik and Morgan, 2013).

In these multiple ways, the experiences of multispecies homescapes become spatial imaginaries, co-constructed through mutual agencies of humans and animals, and consisting of embodied interaction and negotiations of domestic spaces, routines, and practices of care. These imaginaries then serve as sites for interspecies becomings where relationships are created and maintained. Starting from first encounters, many of these becomings last through a lifetime and are partly reproduced in subsequent multispecies relationships, but there are also encounters that are brief or even momentary. As experiences, they take place in the here and now as well as in memories, dreams, and expectations (Russell, 2016).

Crucial to these imaginaries are the understandings of animals as individuals, subjects, and agents. An animal is never only ‘an animal’, and a dog is never just ‘a dog’. Instead, their individual agencies and the spatial and temporal contexts where they become perceivable to humans, encounter them, and interact with them are an inseparable part of who they are and how they and their lives can be understood (Despret, 2004, 2013; Haraway, 2008). In this sense, multispecies homescapes may situationally become interspecies homescapes in which humans and other species are immersed in transformative interaction.

2 Limits, liminality, and boundary crossings

The second perspective focuses on multispecies homescapes as liminal spaces and limited time spaces. The concept of liminality can be defined as a transitory space and time (Banfield, 2022), which applies to multispecies homes in several contexts. Instead of being fixed places that could be wholly grasped in one photograph, homes change in shape and meaning and even in their existence. Some shared homes are temporary in the first place; others are situated away from the house-as-home, in cases of multiple homes embedded in networks of multispecies relationships. An example of this is found in Ojanen’s (2012) study of young girls who spend a considerable part of their free time at horse stables. The girls describe the stable environment as ‘a home away from home’, a place that is thoroughly known, including the horses and the humans, and where they feel secure.

Mobility epitomises liminality in cases where what is felt as home is, constantly or occasionally, on the move. The alternation of presence and absence of some inhabitants of the home, either animals or humans, leaving and returning, may affect the feeling of security and the closeness of the relationship. This is the case with honeybees, which swarm as a colony and sometimes do not return their hives. In beekeeping, swarming has traditionally been prevented, but recent changes in the human–bee relationship have led to the introduction of more humane practices, allowing bees to swarm (Fenske, 2017; Moore and Kosut, 2014). In a similar vein, homing pigeons have an innate ability to navigate and return home after flying. Today, pigeons are regularly let out to fly, guided by the instructions of their keeper, after which they return to the pigeon house (Kavesh, 2021). A longer separation between companion animals and their human families commonly takes place during holidays, resulting in a feeling of emptiness or ‘void’, as described by Holmberg (2019: 26), ‘a notion of a collective “nostalgia,” an emotion connecting past, present and future to experiences of being whole and of being embedded and contained’. Here, the body of the other becomes the epitome of home, disrupted through physical separation.

Similarly, visitors to the home may unsettle home space, challenging the boundary between the home and the outside. Examples include animals that become the subject of wonder, such as rare birds or hedgehogs in the garden. Birdwatching in gardens, as Cammack (2011) shows, can render gardens an important site for nature encounters as well as conservation action. Multispecies homescapes, however, also include interactions with animals that may not be welcome to but nevertheless frequent the home, such as some insects, mice, and rats (Biehler, 2009; Randell-Moon, 2023). With their agencies, rats respond to anthropogenic changes in their living environment; for example, when lockdowns reduced human mobility during the COVID pandemic, rats extended their living space (Parsons et al., 2021).

Liminality can further be observed in how certain animals are situationally understood as either wild or domestic, or something in between, depending on the affects they evoke in humans as well as their use of the home space (Wischermann et al., 2018). Following Fudge (2008: 8), pets can be considered animals that are ‘somewhere between the wild animal and the human’. Their liminal position may in some situations render the place of a pet in a human family vulnerable (Irvine and Cilia, 2017; Shir-Vertesh, 2012). A specific example of liminality are cats, animals that have long held a liminal position in their relation to humans. Palmer and Thomas (2023) explore the challenges faced in wildlife conservation while attempting to identify whether a cat is feral, wild, or someone’s companion, thus highlighting the ethical, political, and social factors that affect the categorisation of cats. In another context, (Srinivasan, 2019: 379) discusses the status of urban street dogs in India: as these animals lead independent lives but nevertheless enjoy some care and protection provided by humans, they can be imagined as ‘unintentional natures’ that ‘unsettle established notions of nature and culture, wild and the domestic’.

Many wild and feral animals frequent the proximity of humans and domestic animals in their homes. In the context of multispecies homescapes, several of them cross the boundaries between wild and domestic and nature and culture. They are perceived as belonging to the wild, and by entering the spaces of home, including gardens and outbuildings, they produce different responses in humans. Some of them belong to species that may be kept as pets or otherwise become known to humans as individuals and are therefore admired or loved. In the Indian village of Musharu, local cobras with an Indigenous status as ‘sacred nature’ interact with the villagers, often inside ‘human’ homes (Saha, 2023). While the cobras are respected, there are other animals entering the home sphere that evoke fear or disgust, disrupting feelings of homeness, and are removed from the home, sometimes by killing, as demonstrated by (Ginn, 2014) in her study of slugs in British domestic gardens.

Sometimes interaction with animals in the home is limited to virtual, one-sided encounters due to a long distance. The proliferation of digital encounters of different types (Turnbull et al., 2023) has brought the lives of physically distant wild animals to human homes, such as in the case of ‘nestcams’. These developments have led to concern about breaching the privacy of these animals, rendering them vulnerable to undesired human encounters including poaching (Paci et al., 2022).

3 Multispecies homescapes as spaces of loss

The third perspective concentrates on loss. It takes the dialectic of home/homelessness (Porteous, 1990/2019) to situations where the home is lost either as a physical place or through the ending of a relationship. Loss of a shared multispecies home may occur due to, for example, separation, migration, housing problems, dislocation, the house being destroyed in a fire, or relationships dissolving. Homes also change when they become spaces of illness and, inevitably, ageing, which in itself does not necessarily have to be seen as an inevitable end to a multispecies home life (Yamasaki, 2020). Deliberate changes in the family structure such as divorce or the birth of a child may lead to a decision to give up the family pet, epitomising yet again the unstable position of pets in the family (Shir-Vertesh, 2012).

Homelessness is a situation that is universally dreaded, which makes visible the very manner in which the home is taken for granted as the most important space (Duncan and Lambert, 2004). Yet, it is rarely mentioned as such until it is lost. For homeless people, their pet is often the one permanent relation in their life, and the pet’s body may thus be felt as home (Scanlon et al., 2021). This embodied homeness may be lost for lack of a homeless shelter where pets would be allowed. A similar situation applies to many care homes, women’s refuges, and child welfare institutions (Fox and Ray, 2019).

In the beginning of the war in Ukraine, many families fleeing their homes and homeland took their pets with them, in an unprecedented turn to multispecies migration. This is conceptualised by Sandvik (2023) as ‘pet exceptionalism’, referring to regulatory modifications concerning border crossing and the provision of services for pets, policies that may lead to unfairness between refugee groups. In other cases of forced migration, however, animals may have to be left behind, leading to a breakdown of the multispecies home (Thompson et al., 2014). Even voluntary migration may disrupt relations between humans and their nonhuman cohabitants, who then become part of what is remembered and missed from the lost hometown or homeland (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Marchetti-Mercer 2019), something that can be especially distressing for children (Riggs et al., 2017). People also move with pets, even internationally, although this often requires considerable financial, practical, and emotional effort (Fox and Walsh, 2011).

Experiences of being home alone, without the other, can be distressing for both human and animal, especially in cases of permanent loss that brings about profound life changes, such as the death of the other (Redmalm, 2015). Death changes the homescape into a deathscape (Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010), a place where emotions related to death are situated and intensified. Examples of animal deathscapes include the veterinary clinic, a common space for pet euthanasia, where public expression of grief may be difficult. Following a recent trend, however, pets can be euthanised at home where the whole family, including other pets, can escort their family member to death in relative privacy (Morris, 2012). A more comprehensive loss of a multispecies home is found in cases where the cattle are all euthanised due to an outbreak of a zoonotic disease on the farm (Law, 2010).

Lost homes, with their animal inhabitants, are mourned and remembered, sometimes in places that represent a continuation of the lost home, such as a gravesite. When a pet is buried in the garden, visiting the gravesite may become a domestic routine, maintaining a connection between the deceased animal companion and the home (Redmalm, 2015). A pet cemetery, on the other hand, offers mourners a specific ‘animal space’ in which expressing grief for deceased animals is allowed (Kean, 2013; Lorimer, 2019; Pręgowski, 2016; Schuurman and Redmalm, 2019). The allegory of the gravesite as a home is found in the willingness of some pet owners to be buried together with their animal companions (Desmond, 2016). While such boundary crossings are not allowed at human cemeteries, some examples are found at pet cemeteries (Brandes, 2009; Maddrell, 2011). In addition, pet remains have sometimes been secretly buried with their owners at human cemeteries by friends or family members (Petersson et al., 2018).

Sometimes the feeling of homeness is lost, and the house-as-home may become a site of trouble. The process of becoming with a significant other of another species (Haraway, 2008) is rarely completely straightforward, and in addition to positive experiences it may include miscommunication, failure, guilt, and traumatic memories that, in the ways they are felt, become part of the imaginaries of multispecies homescapes. Therefore, multispecies homes can rather be defined as nonhomes (Douglas, 1991: 289) when, for instance, the work of caring for animals is felt as a burden or there is tension or discrepancy between humans and animals, including a lack of a shared feeling of domesticity (Power, 2012). In more severe cases including, for instance, domestic violence (Newberry, 2017), the home space may be infected with oppressive power dynamics, control, and fear, resulting in feelings of homelessness at home or even of the home being felt as a prison – for human or animal.

IV Concluding remarks

In this paper, I have proposed a new concept for the study of a home shared by humans and other species as multispecies homescapes. The concept includes human–animal encounters in the home as well as experiences of events that are shared between humans and animals, especially those that emerge from the agency of animals and thus would not be part of a human-only domestic life. I suggest that domesticity is not exclusively human but, in diverse ways, shared by animal companions who co-shape with humans the physical spaces as well as the ideas, experiences, and expectations of what a home is and how conceptions of home change. Although the paper focuses specifically on encounters and relationships between humans and animals, it serves as an opening for a paradigmatic change in how the home should be understood, conceptualised, and explored in geography: as a space that comprises a wide array of species, animals as well as plants and fungi. The central aspects of multispecies homescapes are outlined below.

Multispecies homescapes consist of physical and imaginary spaces that are shared between humans and animals. Whereas the physical spaces consist of any building or structure that is used or felt as home, in which animals live or visit, the imaginaries broaden the understanding of multispecies homes to include experiences, memories, dreams, and expectations of what a home has been or might be. Essentially, the experiences of sharing a multispecies home are co-produced by humans and animals in everyday practices, as homes are not created and felt by humans alone. Animals of different kinds bring their own agencies to what happens in the home, both in the daily rhythms of domesticity and interspecies care as well as in major life events such as migration, illness, or death. Through their mutual interactions, humans and different other species act and enact homemaking, consequently producing spaces that are experienced and felt as well as discursively suggesting what multispecies homescapes might be.

Multispecies homescapes can be approached as lived spaces, co-produced by various animals with humans through their interaction and shared experiences – as observed and interpreted by humans, but nevertheless shaped by both. In this context, it is especially important to see which animals are seen as worthy of having their agencies and subjectivities recognised and interpreted and whose experiences are never considered. Thus, the experience of animals in the home does not have to be positive to co-produce multispecies homescapes.

A home is a multispecies space in which the boundary between humans and animals is enforced, dissolved, and reworked. In the practices of including and excluding animals from the home and creating specific spaces for them around the domestic sphere, humans seek to organise and categorise their environment and those around them. The space of the home is central in this never-ending pursuit of placing some animals inside and others outside of culture and society. Acknowledging the multispecies nature of the home, the most private space of humanity, recognises the interdependency between humans and other species.

My purpose in this paper has been to highlight the need for further discussion as well as empirical research on multispecies homescapes, from a spatial and relational perspective. A crucial dimension of what homes actually are for many inhabitants – human and nonhuman – will otherwise remain invisible and be left out of academic inquiry. I have introduced here emerging avenues for empirical research and theoretical approaches for the study of multispecies homescapes, in different contexts of living with animals, be they understood as domesticated or wild. While recreating and expanding the theoretical understanding of home, such studies have potential for enhancing our understanding of the porosity of the imaginary boundary between humans and other species.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Research Council of Finland, 319855.

ORCID iD

Nora Schuurman

Author biography

Nora Schuurman, PhD, is an animal and cultural geographer and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Turku, Finland. She specialises in human–animal relationality from a spatial viewpoint. Focusing on companion animal cultures, her research pertains animal agency, interspecies care, multispecies homes and human–forest relations.

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