This photo is one of our rescue Podencos, Alba, wearing some cute PJs from an Etsy store than I can no longer find. What do dogs in pyjamas say about our wicked world? Oh so many things. Like so many seemingly ordinary assemblages, dogs in PJs tell rich stories about our world.

There’s a story about when I googled dog activities for Bella the Sprocker who wouldn’t stop pulling and stumbled across canicross and towards meeting my first Podencos. That’s part of a story about how being a ‘good’ dog is entirely contextual to human activities. You’re a ‘bad’ dog if you pull at obedience classes and a ‘good’ dog if you pull at canicross. There’s a story about the privilege embedded in being a ‘good’ person rescuing Podencos from ‘bad’ hunters in Spain that does not ask questions about spending thousands on transport and medication and insurance and vet bills when that money could have been been used for other … better??… kindnesses. There’s a story about how none of this happens without technologies that did not exist when I was an undergraduate embedded in a story about overwhelming pace of change. There’s a story about polyester fleece made from petroleum based chemicals that ties to stories of suffering in so many non-human and human lives. There’s a story about the version of me that buys these things but likes to think she is ethical …

These tracks and traces are all stories about complexity and unpredictability that disturb our sense of any kind of straightforward lines of flight between human values (as if they were ever only human) human intentions (as if they were ever only human) and what emerges in the world. They are lessons about the impossibility of knowing what ethical action might be and the incessant imperative to try to stay with that trouble anyway (thank you Donna Harraway).

What kinds of wicked education enables our students to see these tangled traces and feel for better ways forward …

Photo by Vel McCune