Prof. Carr will give a talk drawing on multi-sited research in a rapidly expanding domain of social service provision in the United States: the deployment of full-time facility dogs as human service workers.

Working across children’s advocacy centers, juvenile detention centers, rehabilitation hospitals, mental health programs, and specialty courts, Prof. Carr has examined how facility dogs are trained, recruited, and institutionalized as therapeutic workers charged with the classically human tasks of communication and care.

Following facility dogs from their birth and early training through their daily work and eventual retirement, her research explores questions such as: What gaps in human service provision are dogs expected to fill? Are they imagined as co-workers, substitutes for human labor, or something else entirely?

More generally, how do facility dogs reshape the everyday dynamics of institutional care?  In this talk, she focusses on the intriguing question of why facility dogs are considered such efficacious communicators and caregivers by their human colleagues and clients. And what that common evaluation reveals about the limits of the “talking cure,” the multimodal nature of therapeutic exchange, and contemporary understandings of language and (interspecies) communication.

About the speaker

Summerson Carr is a Professor at the University of Chicago, jointly appointed in the Department of Anthropology and the Crown School of Social Work, Policy and Practice. 

Working at the intersection of sociocultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology, her research examines how expertise is produced, authorized, and enacted within institutions and professional practice. She is particularly interested in expertise that takes human behavior and interiority as its object, such as social work, counseling psychology, and behavioral health.

Her first book, Scripting Addiction, is an ethnography of mainstream American addiction treatment. Her second, Working the Difference: Science, Spirit and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (2023), is an ethnography that chronicles the remarkable spread of a behavioral health method, called motivational interviewing, and the pragmatism that infuses it.

Her current project is a study of full-time canine workers—or “facility dogs”— in U.S. human service settings. Though this research, she asks how and why American dogs have increasingly come to be seen as expert communicators and caregivers, and what their labor reveals about the perceived challenges and gaps of social service provision.

Livestream

If you are not able to join in person, you can also follow the talk and discussion via the livestream (with the option to pose a question in the chat). 

Workshop 

As part of her visit to Amsterdam, Prof. Carr will lead an interactive workshop for PhD’s, postdocs, and researchers on language and welfare. How do welfare actors encourage people to change through communication? And what role does language play in contemporary systems of welfare?

Combining readings, ethnographic examples, and participant discussion, the workshop invites PhD’s, postdocs and researchers interested in welfare, communication, and anthropology to join the conversation. Interested in participating? Places are limited, so please let us know as soon as possible.