Lauren Van Patter

Profile

I’m a transdisciplinary Animal Studies researcher who focuses most broadly on questions of ‘living well’ in multispecies communities. I draw on my background in Environmental Sciences and Cultural Geographies to explore the cultural, spatial, and ethical dimensions of human-animal relationships, pairing a mixed-methods toolkit with social and critical theory, particularly drawing on feminist, posthuman, and decolonial traditions. As an action-oriented researcher, I have worked collaboratively with veterinarians, wildlife practitioners, biologists, philosophers, and political theorists to produce outputs which extend dialogues around policy, ethics, and practice for a range of domestic and wild species. My work with the Community Healthcare Partnership Program (CHPP) investigates barriers to accessing animal healthcare and strategies to improve access. My current work draws from One Health and aims to address questions of multispecies justice.

Research Interests

My research program has three areas of focus, and I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students with an interest in any of these three topics:

A) ‘Living well’ in multispecies cities [One Health & Multispecies Justice]

• What does it mean to take other-than-human animals seriously as urban residents and co-creators of city life? What can we learn in attending to their experiences, practices, and knowledges?

• How can we conceptualize wellbeing or ‘healthy’ cities across species lines, and what are our responsibilities to other animals, domesticated and wild, who share urban space?

B) Access to veterinary care 

• Using mixed-methods approaches to understand barriers individuals and communities face in accessing veterinary care, and what providers and organizations can do to improve access to care

• Understanding the impacts of inaccessible veterinary care from both community/ service-user and provider perspectives, through lenses of animal welfare, wellbeing, and equity

C) Transformational learning for equity in veterinary medicine [Scholarship of Teaching & Learning]

• How can we most effectively cultivate transformational learning around equitable access to veterinary care through scaffolded curricula and experiential learning?

• What impacts do integrated curricula focused on equity and cultural humility have on veterinary graduates’ later career experiences, practices, and wellbeing?

Links

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hVqGI_kAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao 

Community Healthcare Partnership Program: https://chpp.uoguelph.ca/our-work/research/ 

Selected Publications

Van Patter, L. E., Bateman, S., Clow, K. M., Henderson, L., Kalnins, G., Mitchell, L., & Reniers, J. (2024). Integrated, Scaffolded, and Mandatory Community and Shelter Medicine Curriculum: Best Practices for Transformational Learning on Access to Veterinary Care. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education, (aop), e20230186.

Arathoon, J., & Van Patter, L. (2024). Veterinary ethics and companion animal euthanasia: what can we learn from critical disability studies? Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 11, 1412327. Access here

Van Patter, L. E., Linares-Roake, J., & Breen, A. V. (2023). What does One Health want? Feminist, posthuman, and anti-colonial possibilities. One Health Outlook, 5(1), 4. Access here

Van Patter, L. E. (2023). Toward a more-than-human everyday urbanism: Rhythms and sensoria in the multispecies city. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 113(4), 913-932. 

Van Patter, L. E. (2022). Individual animal geographies for the more-than-human city: Storying synanthropy and cynanthropy with urban coyotes. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 5(4), 2216-2239. Access here

Turnbull, J. J. & Van Patter, L. (2022). Thinking-together through ethical moments in multispecies fieldwork: Dialoguing visibility, expertise, and worlding. ACME. Access here

Van Patter, L., Turnbull, J. J., & Dodsworth, J. (2022). Do-It-Together: ‘More-than-human collaborations’ for hacking the Anthropocene. Feral Feminisms. Access here

Hovorka, A. J., McCubbin, S., & Van Patter, L. (Eds.). (2021). A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

McCubbin, S., & Van Patter, L. (2020). Trophy Hunters & Crazy Cat Ladies: Exploring cats and conservation in North America and Southern Africa through intersectionality. Gender, Place & Culture. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2020.1791802

Sampson, L., & Van Patter, L. (2020). Advancing Best Practices for aversion conditioning (humane hazing) to mitigate human-coyote conflict in urban areas. Human-Wildlife Interactions, 14(2), 166–183. Access here

Van Patter, L. & Sampson, L. (2020). Working towards human-coyote coexistence in cities. The Conversation. Access here

Van Patter, L., & Blattner, C. (2020). Advancing Ethical Principles for Non-Invasive, Respectful Research with Animal Participants. Society & Animals, 28(2), 171-190. Access here

Van Patter, L., Flockhart, T., Coe, J., Berke, O., Goller, R., Hovorka, A. J., & Bateman, S. (2019a). Perceptions of community cats and preferences for their management in Guelph, Ontario I: A quantitative analysis. Canadian Veterinary Journal, 60(1), 41-47. Access here

Van Patter, L., Flockhart, T., Coe, J., Berke, O., Goller, R., Hovorka, A. J., & Bateman, S. (2019b). Perceptions of community cats and preferences for their management in Guelph, Ontario II: A qualitative analysis. Canadian Veterinary Journal, 60(1), 48-54. Access here

Van Patter, L., & Hovorka, A. J. (2018). ‘Of place’ or ‘of people’: Exploring the animal spaces and beastly places of feral cats in southern Ontario. Social & Cultural Geography, 19(2), 275-295.

Hovorka, A. J., & Van Patter, L. (2017). The Lives of Domestic Dogs (Canis Africanis) in Botswana. Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies, 31(1), 53-64.