Embracing self and others: encountering animals in Philadelphia murals

ABSTRACT Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has numerous murals that relate expressions of care about different culture groups, nonhuman animals, the local urban ecosystem, and the environment at large. I discuss these themes in journaled encounters with animals in murals while visiting select Philadelphia neighborhoods during several years. My autoethnographic research is based on photography and making connections with the mural subjects, their symbolism, and related urban spaces. I anchor this study in the literatures of therapeutic landscapes and animality discourses in order to examine how animal mural spaces contribute to establishing “therapeutic assemblages”. My analysis draws me to a rich sense of locals’ care about/for humans and nonhumans that are at times perceived as subaltern, and the local and global environments these animals inhabit. I conclude that Philadelphia’s dynamic landscape alternates in taking down and reaffirming therapeutic places as the city is reconfigured by both gentrification and resistance to urban renewal.