Every month, the IGU-YES! Blog features a contribution from one of our participating members about what it looks like and means to create research from a feminist commitment to care, inclusivity, and justice, in covid times and beyond. In this post, migration researcher Kellynn Wee [link to url: https://kellynnwee.com/] shares an ethnographic meditation on the unlikely, and long-lasting, geographies of encounter facilitated by walks with her dog, Chai. Formerly a Research Associate at the Asia Research Institute, Singapore, Kellynn is Senior Tutor at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Anthropology at University College London.
Walking my dog through lockdown: Are encounters enough to build a community?
Kellynn Wee
Every time I receive the ding of a new email about a migration seminar charting the way that the pandemic has reshaped human mobility, I am startled anew at how much we took border-crossings for granted as a fundamental fact of our experience of time and space. Being in lockdown during the pandemic shrank my own world down to its most basic constituents. Time: twice-daily walks with my dog, sunup and sundown. Space: my immediate neighbourhood in Ang Mo Kio, Singapore.
Most days, these were the only times I left my house. Suddenly the world I moved through—mundane non-places of grassy verges, winding sidewalks and fitness corners—loomed large. It was like I had gotten off a train and now needed to move on foot, slowly, roving ponderously from point to point.
In that period where all norms of everyday human civility were contorted, walking Chai opened up the possibility of everyday encounters in a way that I had never experienced before. The pandemic shocked me into an attentive search for conviviality and connection. The possibility of petting his silky fur was too tempting for many of my newly-masked neighbours to resist; his wagging tail invited eye contact and conversation when we would otherwise hurry past each other, hunched and worried. These encounters offered both tactility and communication in a world that felt like it had suddenly fallen silent.
Elizabeth Johnson writes that encounters “reshape geographic methodologies demanding meticulous attention to the coming together of bodies and things as they come together in events… they seek to account for how moving, more-than-human parts take hold of one another to produce our worlds, bringing to light these plural elements that shape events and constitute difference.”
Now that restrictions have relaxed, my newfound attentiveness to these more-than-human encounters through my daily walks with Chai has yielded a greater recognition of how everyday conviviality could be fostered in neighbourhoods like my own. The fortuitous confluences of weather, person, dog, and landscape knit together encounters that I keep a running documentation of in the Notes app on my phone:
I meet an Indonesian woman watching a kid at the playground. “I used to take care of a dog,” she says as she hugs Chai’s furry wrigglingness to herself. “Baby puppy, golden retriever. When I first saw him I was so scared I jumped on a table and screamed. Ma’am laughed at me.”
Three kids at the playground kicking around a ball: two Malay brothers and a Chinese kid in a kindergarten uniform. “A DOG!” squeals the Chinese kid. “Go touch la,” says the older Malay boy. “I Muslim so I cannot touch.” The Chinese boy squeaks forward, touches Chai on the head, and then collapses back, overwhelmed. The younger Malay boy is inching forward quietly. “HAFIZ!” bellows his brother. “DON’T TOUCH AH!”
In the rain, a Chinese man with a chipped front tooth is zooming down the path with his mobility device and a GrabFood bag. I grab Chai by the leash. He slows almost to a stop and inches by us. “Hello dog,” he says. Chai thinks his bag smells great.
Something about walking a dog opens up these encounters that bring together racial and social milieus. The ability to address each other without approaching each other head-on, to slip sideways like dancers into anecdotes that reflect histories of labour, religion, and class is made possible by having a friendly non-human creature to commentate on. With Chai, I am able to spark conversations with children, delve into a domestic worker’s history of work, and waylay a delivery service rider for a shared instance of attention and humour. These instances give me a glimpse into the variability of human relations, and human universes. They make a way in me for empathy.
What is it about walking a dog that makes these momentary relations possible? What other spatial and social elements invite these serendipitous encounters to occur? What is the value of these fleeting confluences in building a sense of conviviality?
The feminist question here to ask, I think, is how to deepen these encounters into reciprocal relations of care that go beyond the fleeting. Is the encounter enough to produce a civic politics of mutual aid and care, or does it, as Gill Valentine suggests, only romanticise a surface connection? Are we only boats that bump blindly in the night, nosing at each other in brief passing?
I felt this question particularly keenly during the pandemic, as those who most frequently occupy public space within my neighbourhood—the elderly, domestic workers, children, migrant construction workers—are also those who are most likely to deal with adverse or cramped conditions at home. These are the groups who disappeared as I walked Chai through the months of lockdown. I encountered them, certainly, and often threw myself into these encounters with humour and excitement. But now that they had vanished, I had to ask myself: are encounters enough?
As feminist geographers have long noted, home is not always a sanctuary; it embeds, reflects and reproduces hierarchies of power along the formation of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family. If for me, confinement at home was lonely, almost unbearable, what was the experience like for migrant domestic workers, for example—who now have to contend with the enfolding of leisure and work into a shoebox apartment? For migrant women, what was the value of these encounters that occur with strangers in public space?
I think back to a story I heard when I was working on my project with the Indonesian Family Network in Singapore—a group of Indonesian domestic workers who work alongside NGO Transient Workers Count Too to offer support, aid and sociality to fellow migrant women. A domestic worker activist told me how, in the 90s, she met a fellow Indonesian domestic worker while they were shopping in the supermarket—someone who needed help getting out of an exploitative employment situation. The telling of this woman’s story slowly unfurled through carefully timed overlaps in shopping routines, culminating eventually in the trade-off of a slip of paper with a phone number to call for help. For me, encounters are instances of joyful and amusing connection. For others, they might be doorways into a life free of terror.
Because walking my dog enlivened me to the people that lived within arm’s reach, it motivated me to turn to volunteering opportunities that were located within the microgeographies of my home. I began delivering food to homebound elderly within the area and started to volunteer at a thrift shop at a block adjacent to mine.
Without the encounters sparked from these walks with Chai, I don’t know if I would ever have felt the urge to connect with those who lived near me. I never thought that proximity was a good enough reason to seek to enter into relations of care. And while building these relationships, I still continued to walk Chai: sunup, sundown, twice a day, in thirty-minute circuits that take me through these serendipitous gatherings of people, space, and time.
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