Dog(s) walking: darkness, agency, and sensory negotiation

Abstract

Dog walking is typically cast as an ordinary health-oriented routine, yet such narratives obscure the relational, sensory, and political complexities through which multispecies life is organized. This article reexamines dog walking by analyzing nocturnal walks in a private field, drawing on a year-long practice-based research project undertaken with two canine companions. Combining photography, embodied movement, and situated reflection, this study investigates how darkness reconfigures perception, spatial relations, and agency within human-canine encounters.

Engaging with scholarship on darkness, more-than-human agency, and creative walking methodologies, the article conceptualizes darkness not as mere absence but as a spatial-sensory condition that disrupts anthropocentric hierarchies of vision. Limited human visibility foregrounds canine sensory capacities and renders agency legible through movement, traces, and environmental effects rather than through stabilized visual forms. Blurred images, LED trails, and vegetal entanglements operate as methodological artefacts that make distributed agency perceptible while also exposing the technological and embodied mediations through which encounters are recorded. The analysis further situates private dog fields within broader political and infrastructural regimes that shape contemporary dog walking practices. Enclosures, paths, illumination devices, and waste management systems organize responsibility and care, while darkness unsettles these routines, shifting attention from surveillance to embodied familiarity. By centering nocturnal walking practices as both method and phenomenon, the article contributes to innovative humanities approaches that integrate creative practice, multispecies studies, and spatial theory. It shows how walking dogs in the dark distributes agency as relational and emergent and redefines an everyday practice as a site of continual multispecies negotiation.