Dreaming and Ferality: A Philosophical Epistemology of Australia's "Feral Cat Pandemic"
2025
Watt, Kelsey | Environmental Studies | Smith, Michael | Legoas, Jorge
This thesis follows the tracks of the feral cat across ecological, cultural, and conceptual terrains in Australia to rethink dominant narratives of ferality and multispecies belonging. Positioned as a threat within the Australian government’s framing of a “Feral Cat Pandemic,” the cat becomes a figure through which to examine how beings deemed ‘out of place’ are encountered, managed, and imagined. Rather than seeking containment or extermination, this thesis tracks alternative relations to the feral – grounded in movement, relation, and the complexity of place. It contrasts settler-colonial logics through Sara Ahmed’s theory of strange encounters, revealing how feral cats become ecological strangers. From there, the path leads into Indigenous knowledge systems, particularly Pintupi-Luritja tracking practices and Dreaming-Law, also drawing on Deborah Bird Rose’s “footwalk epistemology” within the environmental humanities to refigure place and relation through embodied, situated knowledge. Drawing on queer theory and environmental hermeneutics, it weaves epistemological experimentation with personal reflection, revealing how ferality unsettles not only categories of species and space but also the frameworks through which we understand and relate to the world.
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