Dr Laura McLauchlan

My area of speciality is how transformative change takes place, particularly with respect to environmental and interspecies care and connection.  I investigate the ways in which we come to care for other species and lives, as well as the sociocultural and discursive inheritances that can block such connection. 

I am trained in multispecies anthropology, informed by material feminisms, environmental humanities scholarship, medical anthropology and trauma studies. My work, which ranges from studying hedgehog-human relations, to tree-planting and pedagogical practice, pays ethnographic attention to emergent and marginal ontologies and practices that might allow for greater responsiveness to the interconnection of life.

Through research and teaching, my work attends to the question of what sorts of kindness, delight, and environmental (including human) flourishing might be possible in the face of our current environmental crises.