The purpose of this blog:
Over the past few years, as I have worked full-time in academic research, I have become more and more disillusioned with the state of academic publishing. I went into this work with a fair picture of some commonly lamented flaws, such as the following:
The outrageous pricing structure of academic publishing is akin to health insurance in that is essentially designed to bilk large sums of money out of wealthy institutions; this not only disadvantages professional academics who are not affiliated with wealthy institutions, but also seriously disadvantages students and, more broadly, learners in the Global South who are thus denied access to high-quality research.
A great deal of the labor involved in academic publishing is not compensated; rather, professional academics are expected to contribute labor on a volunteer basis. This includes not only reviewing and editing, but also writing articles and books (for which authors are not paid).
Academic publishing simply no longer produces reliably accurate material. In my own work, I have highlighted not only serious factual errors but also anti-science claims that have made it to print in books published by highly regarded authors by university presses. In my experience, few academic texts (articles or books) receive rigorous editing— likely, again, because the labor of doing so is uncompensated.
Academic publishing is also rife with inequity. There is systemic discrimination against scholars and publications from the Global South, reproducing a situation of colonial hegemony.
Academic publishing operates at such a slow pace that most academic books and articles are out-of-date by the time that they appear.
Very few people in academia would dispute these facts, and they are widely discussed.
I therefore want to use this blog as an alternative to publishing— a place where I can explore academic work and ideas without engaging with the exploitative and unreliable academic publishing system.
Specifically, I want to make use of it as the site of a project that I have been formally and informally engaged with for more than a year: namely, a juxtaposition of the increasing mobility of nonhuman animals (particularly, though not exclusively, dogs) and the decreasing mobility of human animals (particularly, though not exclusively, humans from the Global South).
I first addressed this issue in a paper (forthcoming in Intertexts) that explores the treatment of humans and nonhumans during the August 2021 evacuation of Kabul. At the time, the British evacuation of dogs and cats from Pen Farthing’s Nowzad charity drew a great deal of attention— especially given the fact that Britain had failed to evacuate many British citizens and residents from Afghanistan. My personal experience of interacting with the British government on behalf of a family of British citizens and residents who were not evacuated, and who eventually were helped to return to the UK through the efforts of private volunteers, sparked my interest in the disparity between the treatment of dogs and the treatment of humans. I was fascinated to discover that Purnima Bose had addressed this topic through her analysis of what she terms the “canine-rescue narrative,” which sees nonhuman subjects mobilized to justify humanitarian interventions. However, I think that there is more going on here than simply the mobilization that Bose describes.
I have spent the past year enmeshed in two different spheres that are relevant to this topic. First, due to my own experience of moving internationally with a dog, I have become immersed in the world of international pet mobility: the communities and companies that facilitate international pet mobility, the world of international pet rescue (in which, largely, people from the Global North adopt dogs rescued from the Global South), and the discourses of pet subjectivity that are involved in both. Second, due to the many friends of mine who are refugees enmeshed in the nightmarish realm of what Harsha Walia terms “border imperialism,” I have become immersed in the legal and logistical realities of human migration.
Let me be clear: I write these words at a time when the death toll from the latest refugee disaster in the Mediterranean is still unknown, but is likely to number in the hundreds. Reports suggest that many of those who drowned may have been Afghans, as indeed many people who drown in the Mediterranean are Afghans. Earlier this year, a gifted and prominent Afghan journalist who was known by friends of mine, Torpekai Amarkhel, drowned in the Mediterranean while carrying the ID card that identified her as having worked for the UN. Young people whom I taught in Afghanistan have told me that they are contemplating taking the smuggler route to Europe, overland or by sea. Every time I see a news report about a Mediterranean disaster, I wonder if anyone I knew was on that ship.
Why do Afghans— and Syrians, and Pakistanis, and Palestinians— take this risk? Because there is no other viable escape for them, even when they are in situations of the most extreme danger. The US— a country to which legal immigration is “nearly impossible” (and, yes, I know the link is from the Cato Institute, but you should still read it)— promised many Afghans who had worked directly for U.S. or U.S.-funded entities that they would be protected, but in fact the massive dysfunction of USCIS, combined with the failure of the U.S. government to provide meaningful infrastructure for programs aimed at Afghan allies, have left the vast majority of those who worked for or with the U.S. stranded. Applications for “Special Immigrant Visas” are meant to take nine months to process, but in practice take an average of three years (often longer) and are logistically overwhelming. Applications for P1 refugee resettlement are erratically processed and cannot be processed at all in the countries most accessible to Afghans (Pakistan and Iran). As for European efforts, this recent headline says it all: “New research reveals the EU’s ‘staggering neglect’ of Afghan refugees.”
Personally, I know one young man who worked as an interpreter for the U.S. military and who is considering paying a smuggler to take him and his young family to Europe because he sees no hope of ever receiving a U.S. Special Immigrant Visa. I know another young Afghan family who, like many others, chose to walk from Brazil to Texas in order to apply for asylum at the U.S. border. I know men who worked for the International Red Cross and are now starving, young doctors who taught family planning to rural women and are now left to a government that had threatened them with death. I know journalists, activists, teachers, artists, all of whom are desperate to continue their work— yet who face overwhelming odds against ever being granted a visa to travel to any country for any purpose. Their bodies have been immobilized by the law.
At the same time, in August I will board a luxury airplane operated by a boutique airline that allows small- to medium-sized pets to travel internationally in comfort. For a larger price, I could have participated in a grassroots community that group-charters private jets in order to internationally transport pets of all sizes. If you are paying $8,000 to fly your pet transatlantically, you might also consider the growing industry of luxury hotels that cater to pets, some of which provide doggie room service and doggie spa days. If you happen to be traveling in Turkey or Morocco and fall in love with a stray dog there, you’re not out of luck: a friend of my husband’s who had this experience in North Africa was able to arrange for a local dog rescue to help her transport her new canine friend home to London.
I am fascinated by this figure of the “cosmopolitan dog,” who flies first class and nonchalantly crosses borders. To me, there are echoes here of what Sara Ahmed writes about whiteness and mobility. Ahmed, on the one hand, associates whiteness with an experience of accessibility: “[r]ace becomes, in this model, a question of what is within reach, what is available to perceive, and to do ‘things’ with” (“The Phenomenology of Whiteness” 154). At the same time, she asks whether certain forms of nomadism are made possible for certain subjects “because the world is already constituted as [their] home” (Strange Encounters 83). Finally, she considers whiteness as a kind of agency that allows the “border-crossing” of transformation, in a discussion of the film Dances with Wolves that sees her theorize the character of Dunbar as able to not only “make but… unmake the border between self and other, between natives and strangers” (Strange Encounters 124). The whiteness that Ahmed is discussing is one that is fundamentally characterized by its behavior around borders. Whiteness can cross borders because all places are accessible to whiteness, because all places are home to whiteness, because whiteness has the capacity to make and unmake borders at will.
What does it mean that an African dog can be endowed with this kind of cosmopolitan whiteness, but an African human cannot? Why have we seen industries spring up around facilitating mobility for pets at the same time as mobility for humans has become increasingly and brutally restricted? This seems to me to raise important questions about subjectivity, responsibility, relationship, and the border between “persons” and “commodities.”
These are the questions that I hope this blog will explore.