Getting dusty with mice: domestic experiments in more-than-human methods

This intervention models and evaluates an innovative creative method for more-than-human geography: the reappropriation of non-toxic tracking dust from professional pest management as a means of understanding and revealing animal worlds. Combined with the use of black light, the application of the dust in sites of suspected rodent activity makes visible the otherwise hidden feral mouse movements in the researcher’s own home. Consequently, it responds to calls for greater methodological experimentation to engage with animals’ own ‘beastly places’ and recognises urban homes as sites of unwanted and ambivalent more-than-human entanglements. It also defamiliarises the researcher’s own home, transforming it into an ad-hoc laboratory, disrupting notions of order and cleanliness as well as anthropocentric scale through highlighting rodent presence and agency. While this method literally illuminates unruly natures within the home, its ethical implications are far from straightforward. To what extent are the mice unknowing and unwilling collaborators? And in rendering their worlds visible, do we also hasten their loss and destruction? This method forces a reckoning with the shared yet unequal precarity of home for both domestic pests and the researcher-as-renter.