ANNULE - « Political animals : Security dogs and urban inequality in Kingston, Jamaica »

Rivke Jaffe is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Amsterdam. Connecting geography, anthropology and cultural studies, her research focuses primarily on intersections of the urban and the political, and specifically on the spatialization and materialization of power, difference and inequality within cities. Her current work studies the role of security dogs in mediating urban inequalities in Jamaica. Her publications include Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution and the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean (Oxford, 2016) and Introducing Urban Anthropology (with Anouk de Koning, Routledge, 2016).

Political animals: Security dogs and urban inequality in Kingston, Jamaica
In cities across the world, animals reflect, reproduce and transform urban inequalities – yet their role in mediating social hierarchies remains undertheorized. In Kingston, Jamaica, security dogs have been socialized to identify threatening individuals on the basis of classed and racialized markers, and their deployment in urban policing reflects unequal geographies of protection and endangerment. Focusing on interactions between dogs, humans and security technology, this talk explores how animals’ everyday interactions with their cultural and material environments combine to result in (in)equitable social outcomes.