Aesthetics of Co-ordination: On Behalf of a Kinder Reply

Abstract

In this writing, we recount the story of our journey as a pet-assisted therapy team from a poetic and creative perspective. Attending to the notion of practice-in-action, the authors develop an aesthetics of co-ordination as an analytic and ethical orientation to embrace how relational life is made and unmade in real time. We discuss breed-specific legislation and these constraints framed as a reflexive loop in which typological accounts of danger circulate in the social production of stories, connecting them to the conditions that intensify animal surrender and euthanasia vulnerability. We explore co-authorship with a canine participant as a method: a commitment to co-composed signification and transmaterial worlding, where meaning is created in collaboration with-in and across environments, not extracted from them. As a result, we present a poetic practice narrative offered as a performance-based rendering of our relational knowing.