'Working like a Dog' - Welfare Future Seminar and workshop by Prof. Carr
Working across children’s advocacy centers, juvenile detention centers, rehabilitation hospitals, mental health programs, and specialty courts, Carr has examined how facility dogs are trained, recruited, and institutionalized as therapeutic workers charged with the classically human tasks of communication and care. Following facility dogs from their birth and early training through their daily work and eventual retirement, his research explores questions such as: What gaps in human service provision are dogs expected to fill? Are they imagined as co-workers, substitutes for human labor, or something else entirely? More generally, how do facility dogs reshape the everyday dynamics of institutional care? In this talk, Prof. Carr focusses in on the intriguing question of why facility dogs are considered such efficacious communicators and caregivers by their human colleagues and clients, and what that common evaluation reveals about the limits of the “talking cure,” the multimodal nature of therapeutic exchange, and contemporary understandings of language and (interspecies) communication.
What
Prof. E. Summerson Carr, ‘Working like a Dog: Canine Labor and Therapeutic Communication in U.S. Human Services.’
When
23 June, 15.30-17.00, followed by drinks (location TBD)
Where
REC B5.12, Common Room Anthropology (Roeterseiland, B-building, 5th floor).
If you are not able to join in person, you can also follow the talk and discussion via the live stream (with the option to pose a question in the chat).
Workshop
Prof. Carr has also kindly agreed to lead a workshop on linguistic engineering in welfare whilst she is with us in Amsterdam.
Theme
Scripting welfare. Or, linguistic engineering in welfare.
When
Wednesday 24 June 2026, 09:30-17:00 (including lunch)
Where
REC-C5.00 (Roeterseiland, B-building, 5th floor; only in person)
As with previous workshops organised by the Welfare Futures team, the day will have two parts: one focused on 3 readings chosen by Prof. Carr; one organized around pre-circulated vignettes submitted by workshop participants. These short ethnographic pieces (4 pages max) will act as starting points to discuss practices of linguistic engineering within welfare, or in Prof. Carr’s terms how people “talk themselves into change.” Note that you do not need to submit a vignette to participate in the workshop.
If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please email Tessa Bonduelle (t.m.m.bonduelle@uva.nl). Places are limited so please do let us know as soon as possible.
Prof. Carr’s bio
Summerson Carr is a Professor at the University of Chicago, jointly appointed in the Department of Anthropology and the Crown School of Social Work, Policy and Practice. Working at the intersection of sociocultural, linguistic, and medical anthropology, her research examines how expertise is produced, authorized, and enacted within institutions and professional practice. She is particularly interested in expertise that takes human behavior and interiority as its object, such as social work, counseling psychology, and behavioral health. Her first book, Scripting Addiction, is an ethnography of mainstream American addiction treatment. Her second, Working the Difference: Science, Spirit and the Spread of Motivational Interviewing (2023), is an ethnography that chronicles the remarkable spread of a behavioral health method, called motivational interviewing, and the pragmatism that infuses it. Her current project is a study of full-time canine workers—or “facility dogs”— in U.S. human service settings. Though this research, she asks how and why American dogs have increasingly come to be seen as expert communicators and caregivers, and what their labor reveals about the perceived challenges and gaps of social service provision. She will spend the next academic year as a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Advanced Behavioral Science drafting the monograph—tentatively titled: Working like a Dog: The Hidden Life and Labor of Full-time Facility Dogs.
