Welcome to the final thesis presentation of Pia von den Benken! Pia von den Benken Living Cultures: Negotiating Multispecies Care, Microbiopolitics, and Resilience in Small-Scale Dairying and Cheesemaking in Austria Supervisors: Jamila Haider, Nathan Clay, Matthäus Rest (University of Fribourg); Expert reviewer: Azucena Castro (RICE University); Examiner: Tim Daw Small-scale dairy farming is often portrayed as a more resilient alternative to industrialised dairy production and associated with greater animal welfare, while artisanal cheeses are valued as place-based foods shaped by craft knowledge and traditions. In Austria, small-scale dairying and on-farm cheesemaking are declining, with hygiene requirements among the pressures shaping these practices and their possible futures. Dairying can be understood as co-constituted through relations among animals, microbes, materials, technologies, and people. Drawing on multispecies scholarship, theories of care and resilience, and microbiopolitics, I explore how multispecies relations of care are enacted and negotiated in small-scale dairying in Salzburg State, Austria, and ask whose worlds are sustained through these practices. I conducted a multispecies ethnography combining participant observation, photovoice, and semi-structured interviews. I present the findings through ethnographic stories that follow relations among humans, animals, microbes, materials, equipment, and hygiene requirements. I show that care emerges relationally through multispecies agencies: animals, microbes, humans, and materials shape one another’s capacities to care and are themselves shaped through those asymmetrical relations. Embodied and sensory ways of knowing are central to negotiating care. Smelling and tasting milk, observing animal behaviour, touching curd, and noticing changes in microbial activity or equipment allow farmers and cheesemakers to interpret situations, adjust practices, and respond. Care is continually negotiated amid animal needs, microbial processes, hygiene requirements, economic viability, and expectations of product quality. These practices show that dairying becomes resilient partly through multispecies relations of care. Attending to care makes visible the human work, animal labour, microbial activity, and material functioning involved in sustaining dairying. It shows resilience as a selective and uneven process, taking shape through everyday negotiations over which relations are maintained, restricted, or reconfigured, whose ways of living can continue, and on what terms.

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Cornelia Ludwig

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