Journey to PhD

Chronotopes of Care: A Multispecies Ethnography of Australian Wildlife Carers

My evenings and weekends are filled with marvelous adventures into multispecies ethnography and anthropology of care. 2026 is just the beginning of this journey over the next 5 to 6 years, faster if possible.

In Australia, wildlife is typically understood through the lenses of ecology, conservation science, and management policy. Animals are quantified, modelled, and regulated: their value is measured through population counts, conservation status, or their impact on human activities. This framing, while vital for biodiversity management, is highly reductive. It leaves little room for understanding how animals are experienced and known in everyday, relational, and affective terms.

At the intersections of these frameworks exists a vast and largely invisible network of wildlife carers. These individuals and small groups provide care for kangaroos, wombats, birds, and other species harmed by roads, land clearing, entanglement, and other human impacts. Their work is characterised by deep entanglements with cycles of feeding, grief, loss, and release. Carers routinely adjust their sleeping patterns, restructure their homes and finances, and reorient their social lives to accommodate the needs of injured animals.

This work of care generates forms of knowledge and experience, reshaping what it means to be human and to live alongside nonhuman beings. However, this dimension of human–animal relations remains hidden from anthropological studies, policy discourse, and public recognition.



Chronotope in Context

A chronotope is a culturally and socially organised configuration of time and space that shapes how events, identities, and actions become meaningful within a particular narrative or interactional context. In this research, the chronotope refers to the patterned configuration of time and space through which identities, relations, and forms of belonging are framed and made (visible) intelligible within specific fields of practice.