August Hoffman

August is a PhD Candidate in sociocultural anthropology. In the past, his research has focused on political subjectivity, social movements, and the semiotics of protest. He has brought this sensibility to his current project, tentatively titled "The Bite that Binds: Care, Violence and Liminality in Wolf Sanctuary," which centers on the political ecology between humans, the state, wolves and wolfdog crosses or "hybrids" as it manifests through the contexts of the exotic pet trade, animal sanctuaries, and wildlife management agencies. August is interested in the potential for sites of sanctuary to realize multispecies justice through their attention and investment in interspecies care, individual autonomy, and embodied communications. This work is also concerned with how canids as a genus are incorporated into settler-colonial and biopolitical projects, and how these formations normalize and perpetuate both racial and anthropocentric violence. Relatedly, the project also seeks to reconceptualize narratives of animal domestication and canid ontology broadly construed, interrogating the domestic-wild binary as an outgrowth of colonial nature-culture logics.

Prior to graduate study, August was an organizer in the Fight for $15 movement, Food Not Bombs, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), and several other grassroots causes. From 2016-2019 he was the Education Coordinator at Mission:Wolf, a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary in southern Colorado for rescued wolves, wolfdogs, and horses. He is currently collaborating with both Mission: Wolf and Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in New Mexico for his ethnographic research.