Emerging Voices with Yihan Yan

Hi Yihan! To start, what first inspired you to include animals in your research?

I first became interested in animals as a research topic during my undergraduate studies. At that time, several serious dog-related conflicts in China had attracted nationwide attention and sparked wider public discussions about keeping companion animals in cities. I then joined a research project on restrictions around travelling with companion animals in China, which made me realise how deeply animals are involved in everyday urban life, even when they are treated as marginal or inconvenient.

This also made me reflect on my own experiences of living with companion animals. I used to live with a dog and a cat. I had never thought about their presence academically, but they had already become an important part of my everyday life. They did not simply add another “thing” to the household; they changed routines, relationships, emotions, and the way I understood home, responsibility, and urban life. Since then, I have become increasingly interested in how animals shape, and are shaped by, everyday urban life.

Congratulations on completing your Ph.D.! Could you summarise your thesis topic for us?

My Ph.D. examines companion dogs, urban publicness, and everyday governance in urban China, with Hangzhou as my main case study. The project actually grew out of my earlier research on travelling with companion animals. During that research, interviews with dog owners repeatedly redirected my attention away from tourism and towards everyday life in the city. Many participants talked about feeling tired of being treated as a sensitive or suspicious group, as being confused by strict but unevenly enforced rules, and saddened by the uncertainty of whether they and their dogs were allowed to be in ordinary urban spaces. They were not necessarily asking for a perfectly “pet-friendly” city. What they wanted was a more workable city, where human–dog co-presence could be sustained without constant vigilance, negotiation, or fear of conflict.

Starting from this everyday uncertainty, my Ph.D. asks how pet dogs become framed as urban problems, how dog-related regulations are translated into spatially uneven and discretionary enforcement, and how dog owners respond through everyday tactics. More broadly, I use the case of companion dogs to think about how publicness is made, restricted, and negotiated in everyday urban life.

Is there anything surprising you’ve come across in your research or fieldwork?

One thing that surprised me was how ordinary dog walking can become deeply political. At first glance, walking a dog may seem like a very small, everyday activity. But in practice, it brings together questions of public space, safety, hygiene, civility, law, neighbourly relations, and urban belonging. I was also struck by how dog-related conflicts are not simply about whether people “like” or “dislike” dogs. They are produced through different and sometimes conflicting logics of governance. Official discourses often frame dogs through problems such as risk, hygiene, nuisance, and public order. But these framings do not fully capture the messy situations that frontline officers face in everyday enforcement, nor do they reflect the emotional, practical, and relational ways in which dog owners live with their animals. At the same time, dog owners are not passive recipients of regulation. They actively learn when and where enforcement is likely to happen, adjust their walking routes and times, avoid certain spaces, apologise, move away, or seek out more secure dog-friendly spaces. In this sense, dogs make urban governance unpredictable: their bodies, movements, sounds, and traces constantly draw people, rules, emotions, and conflicts into new relations.

I also really enjoyed doing fieldwork with dogs and their owners. Many dog owners were remarkably open and generous in sharing their stories. Sometimes the dogs themselves were present during interviews or observations, quietly interrupting, pulling, barking, or simply sitting there, reminding me that they were not just “research topics”, but active participants in the everyday situations I was trying to understand.

Is there a resource or theory you’ve found particularly helpful while developing your research? 

I have been influenced by several strands of work. Animal geographies has been especially important for me, particularly Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (eds.) Animal Geographies (1998) and Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (eds.) Animal Spaces, Beastly Places (2000).¹ These works encouraged me to take animals seriously as part of social and spatial life, rather than treating them as background figures, symbols, or simply private companions.

Because my Ph.D. is also about cities and public space, I draw on urban geography as well. Kurt Iveson’s work on publicness helped me ask when and how dogs’ presence becomes publicly noticeable or contested. Foucault’s idea of problematisation helped me understand how dogs are framed as urban problems, while Lefebvre’s work on the right to the city also helped me rethink who and what urban life is for. Therefore, my work sits between animal geographies and urban geographies: animal geographies helped me see why dogs matter, while urban geographies helped me understand how their presence becomes governed and negotiated in everyday life.

How can we find out more about your research?

I have two recent publications related to this research. My forthcoming article in Social & Cultural Geography, “Problematizing Pet Dogs: Media Discourse, Nonhuman Governmentality and Everyday Multispecies Coexistence in Hangzhou, China,” examines how companion dogs are problematised through media discourses of risk, hygiene, civility, and everyday coexistence in Hangzhou.² Another piece, “Pets’ Right to the City: Animaling Public Space in Urban China,” published in Geography Compass, reflects more conceptually on pets’ right to the city and the idea of ‘animaling’ public space.³

I am now continuing to develop work from my Ph.D. on dog-related governance, discretionary enforcement, and everyday negotiations of publicness in Chinese cities. I share updates on publications, talks, and future projects on LinkedIn.

Finally, if you could be an animal, what animal would you be and why?

I think I would like to be a seagull. I always enjoy watching seagulls fly, wherever they appear. No matter where I am, the moment a seagull flies across the sky, the scene suddenly feels more lively and full of movement. I also find seagulls quite funny – when they land, they often look a bit rude or unimpressed, as if they do not care about anything around them. After spending so much time thinking about rules, public space, and boundaries in my research, I sometimes feel that being a seagull — free, bold, and a little bit annoying — would be quite nice!