Melvin Chan

Melvin Chan is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, Canada. He was given a CAF grant for his project “Rescuing Rabbits: An Institutional Etho-Ethnography of Rabbit Welfare and Advocacy in British Columbia.” The grant supported Melvin in advancing his dissertation, enabling him to write portions of his monograph, continue analyzing his data, and present preliminary findings at the online seminar series More-than-Human/ities: Interdisciplinary Collaborations, Multiagential Worlds, co-organized by Dr. Andrew Flack (University of Bristol) and Dr. Catriona Sandilands (York University). He also planned to present his work at Humane Canada’s Summit for Animals in April 2026.

Despite occupying a number of social roles, rabbits’ welfare is often overlooked because of their perceived disposability and lesser sentience. Through the integrated use of feminist multispecies, affective, and decolonial frameworks, the project seeks to challenge anthropocentric and colonial views of human–rabbit relationships and move beyond these perspectives by attending to rabbits’ experiences, behaviors, and affective processes to offer insight into how we can create multispecies communities where rabbits are active participants.

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