Are chihuahuas real dogs? Have you ever been to a Victorian cat tea party? How do dogs motivate us to be better? Anuja and Alev and their guests, Zeynep Arsel and Ghalia Shamayleh, a supervisor-PhD student team from Concordia University challenge the animal-human binaries in this episode and go to the cats & dogs.

Reading suggestions for this episode:

Abidin, C. (2015). Micromicrocelebrity: Branding babies on the internet. m/c Journal, 18(5).

Austin, J., & Irvine, L. (2020). “A Very Photogenic Cat”: Personhood, Social Status, and Online Cat Photo Sharing. Anthrozoös, 33(3), 441-450.

Bettany, S., & Daly, R. (2008). Figuring companion-species consumption: A multi-site ethnography of the post-canine Afghan hound. Journal of Business Research, 61(5), 408-418.

Bettany, S., & Kerrane, B. (2011). The (post‐human) consumer, the (post‐avian) chicken and the (post‐object) Eglu: Towards a material‐semiotics of anti‐consumption. European Journal of Marketing.

Bettany, S. M., & Kerrane, B. (2018). Figuring the pecking order: Emerging child food preferences when species meet in the family environment. European Journal of Marketing, 52(12), 2334-2355.

Beverland, M. B., Farrelly, F., & Lim, E. A. C. (2008). Exploring the dark side of pet ownership: Status-and control-based pet consumption. Journal of Business Research, 61(5), 490-496.

Davison, P. (2012). The language of internet memes. The social media reader, 120-134.

Golbeck, J. (2011) “The more people I meet, the more I like my dog: A study of pet-oriented social networks on the Web”, First Monday, 16(2). doi: 10.5210/fm.v16i2.2859.

Granot, E., Alejandro, T. B., & Russell, L. T. M. (2014). A socio-marketing analysis of the concept of cute and its consumer culture implications. Journal of Consumer Culture, 14(1), 66-87.

Haraway, D. J. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Heath, T. and Nixon, E., 2021. Immersive imaginative hedonism: Daydreaming as experiential ‘consumption’. Marketing Theory, p.14705931211004665.

Hirschman, Elizabeth C. "Consumers and Their Animal Companions." Journal of Consumer Research 20, no. 4 (1994): 616-32. Accessed May 20, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2489763.


Maddox, J. (2020). The secret life of pet Instagram accounts: Joy, resistance, and commodification in the Internet’s cute economy. New Media & Society, 1461444820956345.

J Nast, H. (2006). Critical pet studies?. Antipode, 38(5), 894.

Podhovnik, E. (2018). The Purrification of English: Meowlogisms in online communities. English Today, 34(3), 2-16.