Imagining Stories of and with Animals at Work

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores how narrative practices construct caring relationships between humans and horses at work. It demonstrates, through the use of the Listening Guide method for interpreting interview transcripts, how human workers construct voice on behalf of horses. While acknowledging such constructions do not claim to reflect the reality of the lived experiences of horses, the Listening Guide method offers a ‘way in’ to access the construction of relationship between animal and human, and how humans engaged in human-animal work come to understand the nature of their roles in context. This chapter is grounded within the ethic of care framework, specifically addressing the embodied caring imagination. The narratives examined are based upon 20 qualitative, semi-structured interviews from a range of equine-related organizational contexts. The stories created within these transcripts reveal moments of connection, resistance, or desire on the part of the horses. In these stories, the participants are heard ‘giving voice’ to the horses by literally speaking their side of the conversation. The chapter highlights the ability of the Listening Guide method to provide a space for the researcher to demonstrate the construction of self on behalf of another while acknowledging the power implicit in both the interview process and such narrative constructions, while also enabling a window into the creation of the two-sided relationship necessary for the completion of care, where only one party to the relationship has ‘voice’.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.