Laura Kathryn McClellan

KATE McCLELLAN, The New School, New York, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October, 2021 to aid the writing of her book If We Were Animals: Human-Animal Comparison and Care in Jordan, under advance contract at The University of Chicago Press. The book examines human-animal comparison as it relates to discourses and practices of care and, specifically, the care involved in transnational projects of animal welfare and protection in Jordan. It argues that comparison is both a fundamental technique of relation-making in the world of organized animal welfare, and is also a tool used to critique Euro-American animal welfare discourse and practice in Jordan. The book traces how comparison is used at four sites of animal care across Jordan: two animal welfare education centers in Amman; the tourist site of Petra, where donkey labor is a fraught topic; a wild animal sanctuary in northern Jordan for ‘animal refugees’ of regional wars; and Ammani neighborhoods where new strategies for stray dog management are piloted. Tracing the tensions between human and animal care that emerge at these sites helps contextualize why animal care has become a flashpoint in debates about Jordan’s future.