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Dolphin-Assisted Therapy (DAT) is a field of therapies that have been developed to enable humans with disabilities to achieve improved lives. DAT occurs in a range of places and environments, is theorised in various ways, and is both criticised and supported in a polarised discourse. Its various geographic situations and debates make a socio-spatial understanding of DAT problematic. Previous research on animal-human interactions, and in particular in the scholarship of animal geographies, explores similar challenges from the perspectives of 'the contact zone', reimagining zoos and geo-ethics, but have not explored how interspecies work in therapies can be of significant mutual benefit, and in particular in relation to DAT. This research explores the socio-spatial constructions of DAT to reveal how they affect the therapies and human-animal relations more broadly. Using a social-constructionist onto-epistemological paradigm, and drawing on nonrepresentational theory, Actor Network Theory, and Foucault-inspired analysis, three methods of analysis were used to categorise the data: a genealogy of DAT's history and development, a discourse analysis of academic and non-academic texts, and a case study of a DAT facility. Data was gathered by means of interviews, textual analysis, and personal observation. The findings showed that socio-spatial understandings of DAT are problematized by: varied degrees of proximity between humans and dolphins and the different regimes of knowledge produced by them; environments and their effects on relations between humans and dolphins; noninclusive ethical theories; and a lack of theorising about mutual effects. |
