Fireweed: Toward a Pedagogy of Solidarity Through Gift-Giving, Love, and Activism

• In Event: 60.067 - Collaborative Art and Activism for Eco-Justice Education

Abstract

Fireweed is a rhizomatic plant. It also spreads through fine, fluffy seeds. Following its fuchsia bloom, thousands of seeds begin drifting through the air. After a fire (or war, clear cutting or other ‘developments’ that disturb the soil) fireweed often appears in large patches in northern areas of the world, regenerating the land. In the spring, the stem can be eaten like asparagus. Bees love its flowers. The leaves are used to make tea. The fibres in its stem can be spun, as can the cottony seeds. But this plant is a weed, a threatening presence.
Purpose
AERA’s conference theme, Toward Justice: Culture, Language, and Heritage in Education Research and Praxis, offers creative openings for education research and praxis that is arts-based and activist-oriented. But is this definition of justice—focusing on culture, language, and heritage—too narrow? What about posthumanist and material feminist configurations of relational ethics (Barad, 2003; Haraway, 2004) that include the nonhuman?

Perspectives

In this creative presentation, I will draw on my doctoral research to consider how fireweed became entangled in my understandings of gift-giving (Kuokkanen, 2007; Apffel-Marglin, 2011), in campus activism, and in an unruly story of plant-person alliances in what is normally considered to be anthropocentric practices toward a decolonizing pedagogy of solidarity (Gaztambide-Fernàndez, 2012). During the course of my 1.5-year installation arts-based doctoral research* at The UBC Orchard Garden, a student-led campus teaching and learning garden, the university abruptly moved ahead with plans to construct 1/2 million square feet of residential housing on the garden as part of an international college on campus.

This impending campus ‘development’ necessitated a response, and a “relationship of incommensurable interdependence” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012, p. 46) between fireweed plants and me deepened when I planted fireweed rhizomes in the campus garden as the gift-giving phase of my installation art-based research series, Threads sown, grown & given. Through a growing relationship of beloved intimacy (Bordo, 2008) with fireweed, the arts-based installation series created openings for generative activism or “reparative knowing” rather than a return to “paranoid knowing” (Sedgwick, 2003) that characterizes so much academic work.

Methods and scholarly significance

Through a métissage (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) of narratives and photographs from the research, my presentation tells the secret story of activism within my research and within the expanding corporatization of academia. While this symposium proposes to understand how art, ecology and activism contribute to educational practices, this presentation explores these intersections within post-secondary educational institutions. Whether or not my activism with fireweed on campus was transformative is uncertain; however, “the pedagogy of solidarity is about an action that also affects or modifies the one who acts” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012, p. 54). The arts-based research and activism also created conditions for a plant-person alliance to emerge that reconfigured ideas and relations (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012) through unaccountable feelings of love.

Author

• Julia Kathleen Ostertag, The University of British Columbia