UCLA

Urban coyotes (canis latrans) have increasingly made their homes in American cities like Los Angeles and ongoing research into their flourishing has taken on new urgency due to the reported rise in human-coyote conflict. Using a mixed methods approach for understanding the urban ecology as a natural-cultural system, the following dissertation attempts to think across scales and to grapple with the epistemological challenges of studying a highly adaptable carnivore in an immensely complex urban environment like Los Angles. Utilizing the tools of movement ecology, anthropology, and experiments with imagistic multi-media praxis, and sometimes writing with collaborators across a variety of disciplines, this work adds to the current research paradigm for urban coyotes by highlighting the necessity of thinking with human-coyote relations towards a more capacious understanding of the urban ecology as an ‘ecology of selves,’ one constituted as much by coyote foraging habits and movement patterns as by the perspectival formations occurring through online social media applications like Nextdoor and the municipal policy documents known as “Coyote Management Plans.” Central to the aims of this work is to politicize the study of urban ecology, but also to “ecologize” our contemporary understanding of urban politics. How can we imagine the imperatives of housing justice for humans and questions of urban coyote belonging together? How do representations of urban coyotes come to inform human-coyote relations, and through the materialization of our thinking, other kinds of human-human relations in the urban ecology too? Does urban coyote “management” offer an opportunity for anti-colonial experiments in service of furthering sovereignty for indigenous peoples in cities like Los Angeles? In “At Home with Coyotes,” the necessity of living together with coyotes offers the inspiration for imagining biodiversity and environmental justice as a unified project and holistic ethical practice.