This talk examines how urban planning, animal governance, and racial politics converge in the production of interspecies belonging in Singapore. It asks what drawing—as both a visual practice and an anthropological analytic—might offer for understanding how animal lives are rendered visible, classified, and governable. Focusing on the “Singapore Special,” a term for local mixed-breed dogs, it traces how housing policy, animal-control programs, behavioral training, and administrative classification shape the conditions under which dogs may enter homes and become recognized as legitimate urban inhabitants.
Drawing on ethnographic research with animal-welfare volunteers, the talk considers how governance participates in making the animal kinds it subsequently manages. Drawing offers a way to follow these crossings between bodies and categories, attending to the lines, measurements, thresholds, and environments through which species politics takes material form.

Bio: V. Chitra is an anthropologist and visual artist based at the Australian National University. Her research intersects environmental studies, science and technology studies, and the visual arts. Her first book, Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai (Cornell University Press, 2024), examines how science, management, and planning remake coastal worlds in urban India. Chitra has a background in visual design and works with comics as an ethnographic medium.