116 research outputs found
Nurturing Heritage in Community Gardens
No full textCommunity gardens can support future-focused, more-than-human heritage making, preservation and transmission. By drawing on ethnographic work in community gardens in Canberra, Australia's Capital City, this chapter explores how diverse heritage values and emerging futures are grounded in the practices that are nurtured in these sites. With the aim of contributing to the growing body of work that takes an “ecological approach to heritage in the Anthropocene” (Bangstad & Petursdottir 2022, p. 9), everyday, food-based informal economies of participation are shown to be capable of nourishing soil, the well-being of gardeners and broader human and non-human communities. Moving beyond ideas of place and place attachment, the chapter also suggests that these outcomes emerge from cultivation of a sense of ecological belonging, which is a concept that attunes gardeners to multispecies relations that stretch beyond the temporalities and spatialities of contemporary gardening sites. In so doing, this chapter expands the repertoire of participatory heritage practices and sows the seeds for reimagining collective, public gardening endeavours as important forms of sociocultural participation capable of contributing to the creation of more liveable future
Transformative Heritage Economies:Reimagining Cultural Value, Exchange and Inheritance
No full textHow is the concept of economy relevant to contemporary heritage practices? This opening chapter to Alternative Economies of Heritage considers how economy has long infiltrated heritage imaginaries and practices, despite professional efforts to distinguish its aims from market-driven thinking. It argues that opening-up conversations about cultural inheritance to multi-disciplinary and multi-modal forms of inquiry offers a place for collaborative reimagining of the economy writ large
Urban Farming and the Agricultural Show
No full textThis website emerges from a joint research project between the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra and the National Museum of Australia.In 2011 Joanna Henryks and Bethaney Turner from the University of Canberra approached the Museum proposing a joint research project exploring the institution’s rich collection of historical artefacts associated with agricultural shows. They started working with curators George Main and Kirsten Wehner, from the People and the Environment program, developing a concept that aimed to trace how agricultural shows, past and present, have helped shape understandings of the relationships between food, people and plac
Urban Farming and the Agricultural Show
No full textThis website emerges from a joint research project between the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra and the National Museum of Australia.In 2011 Joanna Henryks and Bethaney Turner from the University of Canberra approached the Museum proposing a joint research project exploring the institution’s rich collection of historical artefacts associated with agricultural shows. They started working with curators George Main and Kirsten Wehner, from the People and the Environment program, developing a concept that aimed to trace how agricultural shows, past and present, have helped shape understandings of the relationships between food, people and plac
Playing with food waste:Experimenting with ethical entanglements in the Anthropocene
No full textAnthropocentric thinking produces fractured ecological perspectives that perpetuate destructive, wasteful behaviours. Recognition of the relational entanglements of humans and more-than-humans, particularly through our everyday visceral encounters with food, may be able to encourage ethical ecological thinking and practices that lay the foundations for more sustainable lifestyles. This paper explores possible ways embodied, convivial and experimental interactions with food waste and its avoidance – along with the various assemblages through which it both acts and is enacted – can support recognition of the entangled relations in which humans and more-than-humans co-become. Excess food, its prevention, reuse and disposal, requires management through intimate human bodily engagements where the very vitality of food is inescapable. The affective force of these necessarily multispecies interactions –which can prompt desires for both attachment and detachment and manifest in a myriad of forms of togetherness – exposes mutual vulnerabilities in living together. Through analysis of ethnographic data gathered from 38 food-producing gardeners and Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) participants in the Australian Capital Territory, this paper maps out how experimental, playful interactions with leftover, surplus or wasted food could contribute to the development of the skills and competencies necessary for adapting to our contingent futures. Encounters with excess food are shown to be capable of assisting in training sensitivities to become attuned and responsive to our more-than-human entanglements and mutual vulnerabilities. This responsive attunement can induce and support ethico-political beliefs and practices that have the potential to disrupt anthropocentric thinking.</p
Taste, Waste and the New Materiality of Food
Full text linkAnthropocentric thinking produces fractured ecological perspectives that can perpetuate destructive, wasteful behaviours. Learning to recognise the entangled nature of our everyday relationships with food can encourage ethical ecological thinking and lay the foundations for more sustainable lifestyles.
This book analyses ethnographic data gathered from participants in Alternative Food Networks from farmers’ markets to community gardens, agricultural shows and food redistribution services. Drawing on theoretical insights from political ecology, eco-feminism, ecological humanities, human geography and critical food studies, the author demonstrates the sticky and enduring nature of anthropocentric discourses. Chapters in this book experiment with alternative grammars to support and amplify ecologically attuned practices of human and more-than-human togetherness. In times of increasing climate variability, this book calls for alternative ontologies and world-making practices centred on food which encourage agility and adaptability and are shown to be enacted through playful tinkering guided by an ethic of convivial dignity.
This innovative book offers a valuable insight into food networks and sustainability which will be useful core reading for courses focusing on critical food studies, food ecology and environmental studies
Embodied connections: Sustainability, food systems and community gardens
No full textCommunity gardens have been identified as providing a model for promoting sustainable urban living. They can also contribute to individual and community reconnection to the socio-cultural importance of food, thus helping facilitate broader engagement with the food system. Such processes may offer pathways to developing a deep engagement and long-term commitment to sustainable living practices predicated on the development of new forms of environmental or ecological citizenship. However, little attention has been paid to how this can be adequately harnessed. Based on an ethnographic study of community gardeners in the Australian Capital Territory, this article argues that fostering an embodied form of sustainability, which accounts for individual embodied engagement in these collective spaces, may play a critical role in achieving these outcome
Taste, Waste and the New Materiality of Food
Full text linkAnthropocentric thinking produces fractured ecological perspectives that can perpetuate destructive, wasteful behaviours. Learning to recognise the entangled nature of our everyday relationships with food can encourage ethical ecological thinking and lay the foundations for more sustainable lifestyles.
This book analyses ethnographic data gathered from participants in Alternative Food Networks from farmers’ markets to community gardens, agricultural shows and food redistribution services. Drawing on theoretical insights from political ecology, eco-feminism, ecological humanities, human geography and critical food studies, the author demonstrates the sticky and enduring nature of anthropocentric discourses. Chapters in this book experiment with alternative grammars to support and amplify ecologically attuned practices of human and more-than-human togetherness. In times of increasing climate variability, this book calls for alternative ontologies and world-making practices centred on food which encourage agility and adaptability and are shown to be enacted through playful tinkering guided by an ethic of convivial dignity.
This innovative book offers a valuable insight into food networks and sustainability which will be useful core reading for courses focusing on critical food studies, food ecology and environmental studies
Taste, Waste and the New Materiality of Food
No full textAnthropocentric thinking produces fractured ecological perspectives that can perpetuate destructive, wasteful behaviours. Learning to recognise the entangled nature of our everyday relationships with food can encourage ethical ecological thinking and lay the foundations for more sustainable lifestyles.This book analyses ethnographic data gathered from participants in Alternative Food Networks from farmers’ markets to community gardens, agricultural shows and food redistribution services. Drawing on theoretical insights from political ecology, eco-feminism, ecological humanities, human geography and critical food studies, the author demonstrates the sticky and enduring nature of anthropocentric discourses. Chapters in this book experiment with alternative grammars to support and amplify ecologically attuned practices of human and more-than-human togetherness. In times of increasing climate variability, this book calls for alternative ontologies and world-making practices centred on food which encourage agility and adaptability and are shown to be enacted through playful tinkering guided by an ethic of convivial dignit
Connecting Our Stories:Writing an Indigenous Studies Textbook
No full textThis chapter outlines the rationale embedded in the teaching of Indigenous Studies through the Faculty of Arts and Design (FAD) at the University of Canberra (UC), Australia. Our collective works collaboratively across our teaching and research through the First Nations Collaborative Research Web (the Web). The units in Indigenous Studies offer a progressive set of learning encounters via units named: Connections to Country, Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Indigenous Cultures and Digital Contexts and Culture: Voicing the Living Archive. When teaching, we draw on our lived experience, academic backgrounds, and share a little of our knowledge of our Countries (the places we hold ancestral connections to). To do this we talk about research we have done on Country and sometimes tell stories linked to Country or speak the words that have been passed down through family. A key aim is to help students to understand diversity and that each Country produces distinct ways of knowing, being and doing. By compiling some of our anti-colonial teaching practices, research approaches and materials into an open access textbook, we aim to share our stories and learnings to support the learning of students in our units and inspire others to enact anti-colonial teaching and research practices.</p
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