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Author ORCID Identifier

 

Date Available

4-28-2026

Year of Publication

2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Geography

Faculty

Anthony Stallins

Faculty

Nick Lally

Abstract

In 2015 Kearny-Nebraska court case determined that student campus housing is considered a dwelling and is therefore covered by housing antidiscrimination laws. Since then, increasing numbers of students across U.S. campuses applied to bring an emotional support animal to live with them. Emotional Support Animals (ESAs) are defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as “trained or untrained animals that do work, perform tasks, provide assistance, and/or provide therapeutic emotional support for individuals with disabilities.” Persons requesting ESA accommodations usually must provide documentation from a medical provider or therapist. ESAs remain a legally and socially contested category of companion animals. Public and media outrage surrounding ESAs in spaces such as airplanes, housing, and college campuses signals the disruption these animals pose to conventional classifications of space, disability, and animality. The discourses on the coexistence of ESAs and differently abled students in university rarely receive rigorous critical analysis, despite the public attention and proliferation of these animals on college campuses; moreover, there is a deficiency of indepth qualitative studies that center the student-ESA relationships. Building from critical feminist disability and animal geographies, this research examines how care is enacted within human–companion animal relationships through legal, spatial, and affective practices. This dissertation centers the experiences of college students living with ESAs on campus, where questions of home, mental health, and the proper place of companion animals converge. I have conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with students who live with their ESAs on the University of Kentucky campus. The interviews took place in student housing with the animals present. In addition, I analyzed ESA policies from twenty-five universities across the country focusing on similarities and differences between campuses, and ease of access to this information by the students. The policy analysis was supplemented with interviews with accommodations administrators from six universities, which provided information about species of ESAs, application process, and policy enforcement. Drawing on these methods, I demonstrate that ESA relationships reconfigure campus spaces by blurring distinctions between public and private, formal and informal care, and institutional and intimate life. Students describe their ESAs as responsive companions who participate in everyday practices of emotional regulation, while institutional policies attempt to stabilize these relationships within bureaucratic frameworks that often fail to capture their relational complexity. I argue that animal– disability geographies unsettle distinctions between ability and disability and challenge hierarchical human–animal relations. I reframe ESAs as a pathway toward what Sunaura Taylor describes as an ethic of care, one that understands humans and animals as entangled in interdependent relationships, recognizing animals’ vulnerability without reducing them to instruments of human benefit. This research contributes to geographic debates on care, disability, and more-than-human relations by demonstrating how multispecies care practices emerge within institutional spaces and by identifying the tensions that arise when relational forms of care encounter regulatory systems. In doing so, it highlights how animal liveliness reshapes campus life and opens possibilities for more ethical forms of coexistence. Instead of increasing regulation, this research suggests that a more flexible approval process and greater support for ESAs on campus will benefit students with emotional impairments.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2026.147

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