The Birds Planted the Sunflowers! Feminist Intersections of Animal and Human Performativity in an Urban Community Garden

• In Event: 72.034 - Feminist Approaches to Animal-Focused Education: Illuminating the Intersections and Following New Tracks in Environmental Education

Abstract

Examining the history of the development of the city, and urban spaces more generally, it is apparent that cities were created by and for people, an assertion that empirical work supports (Hinchliffe, Kearnes, Degen, & Whatmore, 2005; Philo, 1995; Wolch, West, & Gaines, 1995). Researchers participating in the "animal turn” in the social sciences have challenged that idea, however, and instead conceptualize city spaces as potential sites of multispecies flourishing (Corman, 2011; Holm, 2012; Palmer, 2003). While the urban community garden literature engages with scholarship in environmental and nutrition education and with research on food access, justice, and sovereignty, there is scant scholarship examining how community gardens might foster socioecological learning (Neves, 2009) in urban spaces so that the concept “community” might be conceptualized as inclusive of animals, particularly common or non-native animals like roly poly bugs, squirrels, and sparrows. (See Ginn, 2014; Hinchliffe & Whatmore, 2006; Neves, 2009; and Nxumalo, 2015 for exceptions). The research site for this study is the Center Street Community Garden in suburban southern California, where undergraduate students in my Critical Food Studies course complete service learning hours. In addition to the teaching I do in the garden with my students, I am engaged in a long-term, community-based multispecies ethnographic study of the site. In the current paper, I draw on extant theories of socioecological community and learning (Fawcett, 2005; Hinchliffe & Whatmore, 2006; Neves, 2009; Nxumalo, 2015), feminist posthumanist theory (Hovorka, 2015; Lloro-Bidart, 2016), and ethnographic data (interviews, participant-observation, student service learning autoethnographies) to examine how gendered human performances (care, empathy) and animal performances (planting seeds, aerating soil) intersect in an urban community garden to change “the very notion of what constitutes a [human] self…into a holistic concept of the self—that is in turn understood as always relationally and dynamically connected to the surroundings of which the person is a constitutive part” (Neves, 2009, p. 147). That is, I explicate how some of my students (all women) develop a human self that is not only constituted discursively and materially through human action and interaction with other animals, but also because animals are active, communicative participants in the garden. Since most of the animals my students come to care for and empathize with are common, non-native animals, this has important implications for environmental education curricula, which often reproduce native/non-native and wild/urban species dichotomies, with the implicit assumption that native and wild species are inherently “good” and non-native, urban species are inherently “bad.” Further, since my students demonstrate compassion for species who perform in desirable ways (despite their common or non-native status) and do not discuss care or empathy for the garden’s resident “invasive species” like the Bagrada bug, I discuss how care and empathy for other species are complexly tied not only to human discursive constructions, but also animal performances, suggesting that the inclusion of animals in socioecological communities is always asymmetrical (Haraway, 2008) and bounded (Ginn, 2014; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015).

Author

• Teresa Katrina Lloro-Bidart, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona