August D. Hoffman

August is a PhD Candidate in sociocultural anthropology with a Graduate Minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Their dissertation, "The Bite that Binds: Care, Violence and Liminality in Wolf/Dog Sanctuary," is a multispecies ethnography of animal sanctuaries for displaced wild-type canids (e.g. wolves, coyotes, foxes, dingoes, and various canid "hybrid" species) in the U.S. Southwest. The project examines practices of trans-species care and communication to explore the following questions: What are the ethical bases of our kinships and politics with more-than-human others? How do humans and other animals negotiate the boundaries of multispecies community under conditions of precarity, interpersonal harm, and structural violence? What forms of multispecies love, solidarity, and justice take shape under the banner of “sanctuary” or "refuge"? An overarching goal of the work is to demonstrate  how caring for other animals across radical difference not only displaces the human—enlightenment’s rational Man—as locus of power and knowledge, but also catalyzes the formations of queer kinships and anticolonial solidarities.  This work is also concerned with how canids as a genus are incorporated into settler-colonial taxonomies and biopolitics, and how such regimes 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.

Projects in development include an ethnography on the politics of reservation dog (colloquially “rez dogs”) management and access to veterinary care in Tribal Nations. This research examines the divergence between settler and Indigenous practices and ideologies of “pet keeping” or relating to other animals.  Another nascent project is a historiography of 19th and 20th century U.S. predator extermination campaigns and their settler-colonial mnemonics and politics of memory, and discursive co-constructions of Indigenous humans and nonhumans as “domestic terrorists."

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 they were the Education Coordinator at Mission:Wolf, a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary in southern Colorado for rescued wolves, wolfdogs, and horses. August is currently collaborating with both Mission: Wolf and Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary in New Mexico for their ethnographic research.