Animal Rights And The Ethics Of Multispecies Co-Living: Everyday Life Of A Vegan Farm

This thesis examines multispecies co-living at a vegan farm established in İzmir,Turkey. It explores this locally rooted initiative’s potential for reimagining a nonspeciesistway of living while investigating how a rights-based approach is enactedin practice. It reads the formation of interspecies relations through an ethnographiclens embedded in everyday life and attuned to sensory experiences. Drawing onveganism and animal rights, it builds the theoretical framework to explore therights-based motivations underpinning such an initiative. Focusing primarily oninteractions between chickens and humans but also considering the relations betweenmany other species living on the farm, the thesis highlights the significance ofsensory engagement in ethically informed, care-based relationships. By examiningthese interactions through everyday routines, it considers how non-speciesist knowledgeproduction and dissemination occur. Rather than portraying the farm as aplace without challenges or conflicts, the study attends to the complex realities ofco-living—including illness, death, and conflict—arguing that such experiences areintegral to building interspecies communities. It further contends that these spacesfunction as sites of knowledge-making, community-building, and resistance—bothmaterially and politically—against systemic animal exploitation, while also providingpractical insight into how ethical multispecies cohabitation can be implementedin everyday life.