Finding Sanctuary: Approaches to Multispecies Community and Justice

August Hoffman (Anthropology) is a 2024–2025 HRI Graduate Fellow. His current project centers on the political ecology between humans, the state, wolves, and wolfdog crosses or “hybrids” as it manifests through the contexts of the exotic pet trade, animal sanctuaries, and wildlife management agencies. August is interested in the potential for sites of sanctuary to realize multispecies justice through their attention and investment in interspecies care, individual autonomy, and embodied communications.

Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.

What is unique about your research on this topic?

I think something unique about my research is how it attempts to bridge between disparate fields. My dissertation, “The Bite that Binds: Care, Violence and Liminality in Wolf Sanctuary,” is inspired by a small but growing body of scholarship at the intersection of Animal Studies, Indigenous Studies, Settler-Colonial Studies, and Black Studies which asks how constructions of species, race, and coloniality are intertwined or mutually elaborating. It demonstrates how a critical analysis of anthropocentrism— the ideology of human supremacy over all nonhuman life—is fundamental to understanding not just the oppression and degradation of animals and natural environments, but also intrahuman systems of oppression and social stratification. In other words, how we think, perceive, and talk about other animals inevitably refracts and rebounds onto how we understand humanity. However, I do not use the animal subjects in my research—wolves, wolfdog crosses, and other species of canid—as mere metaphors, symbols or foils for exclusively human concerns. Rather, these other-than-human beings are key interlocutors whose biographies, experiences, and agentic capacities are every bit as important as the humans who participate in my study. To this end, I utilize an immersive multispecies ethnographic approach to understand processes of interspecies care, relationality, communication, and identity formation among human and nonhuman animals in the context of wildlife sanctuary and rescue.

What drives your interest in this research?

I have always had a deep and abiding love for animals, but specifically canines. Shortly after completing my undergrad degrees and before applying to graduate school, I thought I would indulge my child-like wonder with canines by volunteering at a wolf sanctuary for a few months. This remote facility was specifically for wild-type canines born in captivity, mostly wolves and wolfdogs bred as pets, but which then became too difficult for their “owners” to handle. Those few months turned into nearly three years, and, like many of my friends who also helped care for the wolves, I realized I had found my own personal form of sanctuary or refuge in that beautiful, strange and paradoxical place. This created a desire in me to learn about and further theorize concepts of multispecies community and justice, and to interrogate what it means—philosophically, ethically, and materially—for humans and a variety of other creatures to live, die, flourish and struggle in the noble but inevitably imperfect pursuit of “sanctuary.”

How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?

The interdisciplinary atmosphere of HRI has been incredibly enriching for my thinking. I am constantly amazed by the dynamic and creative work my colleagues are engaged in. Most importantly, the generous feedback I’ve received from them has instilled a new confidence in me. I knew that my ideas were important, but I wasn’t always sure that I effectively articulated them, or that my particular writing style (one which I felt often defied convention and genre) was conducive to academia. I continue my work knowing that, while my ideas are important in their own right, the specific way in which I’m conveying them also constitutes its own powerful contribution to the many fields of study I’m situated between.