This talk examines how urban planning, animal governance, and racial politics converge in the production of interspecies belonging in Singapore. Through this, it considers what drawing, as an analytic, might offer anthropology for understanding how more-than-human worlds become governed. Focusing on the “Singapore Special” — a term for local mongrel dogs — it traces how housing policy, behavioral training regimes, and administrative classification shape the conditions under which dogs can find belonging in the island-city.

Recent shifts from culling toward sterilization and rehoming appear to signal a more humane approach to animal care. Yet these interventions install a more demanding managerial logic: dogs must demonstrate governability — proper conduct, emotional regulation, adaptability — to qualify for care. Belonging is produced through the same administrative machinery that has long mediated human access to housing, mobility, and security in Singapore, where racialized ideals of civility and order underpin the city-state’s developmental project.

Drawing on ethnographic research with animal welfare volunteers, the talk delves into how managerial logics naturalize the conditions they impose, and sits with the limits of companionship that cannot accommodate refusal, flight, and ferality.

V. Chitra is is an anthropologist and visual artist based at The Australian National University. Her research intersects environmental studies, science and technology studies, and the visual arts. Her first book, Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai (Cornell University Press, 2024) looks at how science, management, and planning remake coastal worlds in urban India. Chitra has a background in visual design and works with comics as an ethnographic medium.

Spring 2026 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2026 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.