My research examines how learning, care, identity, and ethical responsibility emerge through relationships across family, community, and more-than-human life. As an interdisciplinary social scientist, I draw on qualitative, narrative, feminist, posthuman, arts-based, and multispecies methodologies to explore the relational dimensions of everyday life.
Across my work, I am interested in how humans become through relationships — with other people, institutions, stories, and more-than-human life — and how these relationships shape caregiving, belonging, responsibility, and social change.
My scholarship spans several interconnected areas, including:
- multispecies relationships and more-than-human family life
- narrative identity and relational becoming across the life course
- caregiving, ethics, and family relationships
- allyship and Indigenous approaches to knowledge and pedagogy
- professional and practice-based learning
- qualitative, arts-based, and multispecies methodologies
- interdisciplinary and community-engaged pedagogy
I am Director of the FIDO Research Lab at the University of Guelph, where we explore multispecies relationships, with a particular emphasis on dog–human relationships. Through collaborative and community-engaged research, the lab examines relationships between humans and non-human animals as contexts for learning, care, and ethical responsibility.
Much of my current research focuses on relationships between humans and dogs, particularly within family and community contexts. This work explores care labour, relational responsibility, vulnerability, and coexistence in multispecies homes and communities.
My research is informed not only by academic scholarship, but also by extensive practice-based engagement in canine behaviour, welfare, and family support contexts. In preparation for developing a research program attentive to the lived realities of multispecies relationships, I undertook advanced professional learning in canine behaviour and welfare and worked directly with dogs, caregivers, and professional communities across diverse cultural and community settings. This practice-based work continues to shape my research, teaching, and writing on relational learning, ethics, caregiving, and more-than-human life.
Current collaborative projects include:
- qualitative research on care relationships between humans and dogs in Canadian families;
- research examining human and companion animal relationships in contexts of displacement;
- mixed-methods research exploring social norms among free-ranging dogs in India;
- and interdisciplinary work examining care, maintenance, and repair in more-than-human urban environments.
My research has been supported primarily by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Dr. Andrea Breen 