Mushing the Chthulucene in a Multispecies Home
Context
This short writing sample derives from my article in the forthcoming issue of Anthways —Goldsmiths Anthropology Postgraduate Research Journal— and from fieldwork conducted in Swedish Lapland between 2021 and 2025 as part of my Master’s research. My work operates at the intersection of environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, and feminist theory. It explores how relational practices—of care, refusal, and cohabitation—can generate ethical and affective insights into life in the Anthropocene. The text below offers an anticipatory synthesis of that research, written to reflect both my methodological engagement with composting storytelling and my commitment to academic writing that remains attuned to texture, voice, and poetic resonance.
In the mountain valley of Kittelfjäll, Swedish Lapland, where forests breathe frost and silence fractures beneath the howl of sled dogs, a musher’s household becomes the locus for exploring what it means to live and think with others—human and more-than-human alike. This research explores how a everyday practices of cohabitation reshape the meaning of home, kinship, and care. Drawn from immersive fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2025, Becoming-With in Swedish Lapland follows a musher’s family and their eleven sled dogs, tracing how multispecies dwelling unfolds as acts of ethical and ecological attunement in an increasingly commodified North.
Framed through Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene and grounded in feminist and environmental anthropology, this work resists the linear narratives of the Anthropocene. Instead, it moves through a terrain of entanglement—where trails, gestures, and silences become sites of multispecies world-making. As a dog handler living within the pack, I participated in their rhythms of movement and rest, in the sensory grammar of snow, body, and voice. The research adopts composting storytelling (Hohti et al. 2023) as both method and ethic: stories here ferment rather than conclude, layering fragments of fieldwork into a textured account of coexistence.
Within this family/pack assemblage, daily routines—feeding, training, running, resting—extend beyond labour or affection. They articulate a shared, intersubjective life that dissolves the boundaries between domestic and wild. “If we put them in boxes, they’re no longer a pack,” the musher, Håkan, once told me. His words crystallise an ethos of refusal: a rejection of the extractive logic that turns animal lives into products or performances. In this home, dogs are kin, co-authors of space, and participants in a choreography of mutual presence.
As Kittelfjäll transforms under the pressures of tourism, climate change, and development, these multispecies relations become quiet acts of resistance. Trails once alive with pawprints are erased by construction and snowmobile routes, yet the family adapts—reorienting their paths deeper into the forest, recalibrating their sense of place. These gestures of adjustment are not retreat but resilience: refusals that keep relational ethics alive within an increasingly commodified landscape.
Grief, too, inhabits this ecology. Each winter, candles burn for the dogs buried in the garden—small flames against the Arctic dark, commemorating lives intertwined beyond death. Such rituals enact Haraway’s call to make kin, transforming mourning into continuity. Memory becomes a living practice, binding human and canine stories into the same luminous thread of care.
This multispecies ethnography, grounded in sensory participation and relational ethics, proposes that knowledge itself can emerge through companionship. It asks what it means to dwell attentively—to think with rather than about—the beings and places that sustain us. In the fragile stillness before each run, when the forest holds its breath, one feels the pulse of a shared world: a world not mastered but negotiated, remade through the quiet practice of staying with the trouble.
Håkan and Lotta during our last dog-run together – photo by Lisa McClure
