Herre de Bondt

Herre de Bondt works as a postdoctoral researcher on the ANIMAPOLIS project. His research looks at dogs in Amsterdam and how they contribute to urban safety throughout the city. Specifically, Herre explores how safety emerges in dog ownership and how this intersects with differences along lines of class and race.

 

Previously, Herre studied anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and continued to do a research master in urban studies at the Universiteit van Amsterdam where he himself took 'the animal turn'. In his master's thesis, Herre developed an interest in urban multispecies conflicts which led him to research how entanglements of waste, humans, and birds result in negotiations over urban space. Herre specifically looked at large-billed crows in Tokyo and gulls in The Hague which led him to consider multispecies conflicts and the ways humans deal with this from a biopolitical perspective. Herre stayed at the UvA after graduating where he worked as a junior researcher to investigate how residents from different socio-economic areas in Amsterdam deal with the presence of rats. Afterwards, he moved to London to complete a PhD at the University of Roehampton to explore the anthropological dimensions of urban bird feeding. Focusing on garden birds, pigeons, and the recently reintroduced red kite, Herre considered the act of feeding as constituting a multispecies act of placemaking that challenges conventional perspectives on urban ecologies.

 

Building on his experience with urban multispecies negotiations of space and belonging, Herre now turns Amsterdam’s dog-human relations. Dogs cohabitate houses with humans where interspecies difference is unavoidable. However, broader society assigns more importance to some differences as is evident from the categories of ‘high-risk dogs’ on the canine side, and ‘good owner’ and ‘bad owner’ on the human side. His research dives into these differences to investigate how dog-human relationships reconfigure urban (un)safety and how this is negotiated.