Social Media Images of Urban Coyotes and the Constitution of More-than-Human Cities

Abstract

Abstract When images of coyotes in North American cities first made the news in the 2000s, they were widely understood to show a wild animal out of place. The coyote in such images served as the natural pole on a nature-culture continuum and the city served as the cultural pole, thus reinforcing the idea that humans and wild predators inhabit categorically different worlds, spatially and ecologically. However, the ubiquity of smart phones and the growing abundance of urban coyotes have since led to a proliferation on social media of images that reveal coyotes as residing in urban settings as opposed to being lost in them. Such images drive processes of multispecies place-making that involve struggles for control and negotiations of acceptable levels of risk, but also give rise to novel expressions of kinship and ways of being well together in multispecies neighbourhoods. Using visual methods, this chapter weaves together insights from human-animal studies, new materialist thinking, and work within organization studies on space to better understand how multispecies place-making remakes urban locations though practices of accommodation. It asks not what images of urban coyotes show, but what they do; how such images do not just represent space and place, but how the joint activities of coyotes and humans (and their companion dogs) made visible on social media are remaking neighbourhood parks in San Francisco and Philadelphia as places that accommodate coyotes as fellow urban dwellers.

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