{"id":479,"date":"2025-11-05T14:05:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T14:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lizamcclure.com\/?page_id=479"},"modified":"2025-11-05T14:05:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T14:05:25","slug":"becoming-with-in-swedish-lapland","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/lizamcclure.com\/it\/becoming-with-in-swedish-lapland\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming with in Swedish Lapland"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mushing the Chthulucene in a Multispecies Home<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Context<\/h2>\n

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This short writing sample derives from my article in the forthcoming issue of Anthways<\/i> \u2014Goldsmiths Anthropology Postgraduate Research Journal\u2014 and from fieldwork conducted in Swedish Lapland between 2021 and 2025 as part of my Master\u2019s research. My work operates at the intersection of environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, and feminist theory. It explores how relational practices\u2014of care, refusal, and cohabitation\u2014can 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In the mountain valley of Kittelfj\u00e4ll, Swedish Lapland, where forests breathe frost and silence fractures beneath the howl of sled dogs, a musher\u2019s household becomes the locus for exploring what it means to live and think with<\/i> others\u2014human 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<\/i> follows a musher\u2019s family and their eleven sled dogs, tracing how multispecies dwelling unfolds as acts of ethical and ecological attunement in an increasingly commodified North.<\/p>\n

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Framed through Donna Haraway\u2019s Chthulucene<\/i> and grounded in feminist and environmental anthropology, this work resists the linear narratives of the Anthropocene. Instead, it moves through a terrain of entanglement\u2014where 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<\/i> (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.<\/p>\n

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Within this family\/pack assemblage, daily routines\u2014feeding, training, running, resting\u2014extend beyond labour or affection. They articulate a shared, intersubjective life that dissolves the boundaries between domestic and wild. \u201cIf we put them in boxes, they\u2019re no longer a pack,\u201d the musher, H\u00e5kan, 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.<\/p>\n

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As Kittelfj\u00e4ll 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\u2014reorienting 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.<\/p>\n

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Grief, too, inhabits this ecology. Each winter, candles burn for the dogs buried in the garden\u2014small flames against the Arctic dark, commemorating lives intertwined beyond death. Such rituals enact Haraway\u2019s call to make kin<\/i>, transforming mourning into continuity. Memory becomes a living practice, binding human and canine stories into the same luminous thread of care.<\/p>\n

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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\u2014to think with<\/i> rather than about<\/i>\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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H\u00e5kan and Lotta during our last dog-run together – photo by Lisa McClure<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Read the full article on Anthways<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mushing the Chthulucene in a Multispecies Home Context   This short writing sample derives from my article in the forthcoming issue of Anthways \u2014Goldsmiths Anthropology Postgraduate Research Journal\u2014 and from fieldwork conducted in Swedish Lapland between 2021 and 2025 as part of my Master\u2019s research. My work operates at the<\/p>\n

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