Seeds of Change and Renewal: Building a Campus Community Garden in Precarious Times

• In Event: 50.010 - University Learning Gardens: Cultivating the Margins, on Borrowed Land and Time

Abstract

Using multiple metaphors centered on “survival,” “change,” and “renewal,” we trace the challenges and successes of the recently developed East/West Community Garden at a small Jesuit university in upstate New York. Integrating college concerns with survival amid increasing pressures in higher education, urban renewal processes in a rust-belt city, and wider issues with climate change and environmental justice, we engage in an educationally focused political ecological analysis of our own garden’s recent history (Lloro-Bidart, 2015). Given our ideological and geographical situatedness, members of the garden team will cover several evolving educational goals building on Jesuit values (including Pope Francis’ (2015) encyclical, Laudato Si), principles of environmental justice, ecofeminism, and posthumanism (Ostertag, Gerofsky, & Scott, 2016; Lloro-Bidart, 2018).

We are building the garden as a pedagogically integrative location, encouraging connections between local refugee communities from the Congo and Somalia; public school partners; college students, faculty, and staff; as well as non-human beings that we are accommodating and inviting into the space, such as native plants, rabbits, birds, and invertebrates. Each of these connections has been met with very particular challenges, including requests to tie garden goals with institutional anxieties around spending and enrollment, granting agency concerns over our location as an “east side” or “west side” project, managing faculty work loads, institutional distrust among the local community, curricular spaces, an absence of initial community participation in planning work, and even community concerns about “scientific” experimentation and bees.

Each of these challenges have been met with renewed political and educational commitments to what Williams (2010) refers to as “regenerative hope… hope that creates practical possibilities, hope that fosters imagination as life-less grey concrete is converted to humus-enriched soil that supports the miracles of life, and hope that arouses the hitherto desensitized senses into remembering our connection to soil and food, and in the process of doing so, to our bodies.” In the face of increasing neoliberal emphasis on instrumentalism in higher education (Giroux, 2014), we invite participants in the session to engage in imaginative and dialogical activities encouraging their own identification of barriers to and pathways toward regenerative hope, including adapted elements from Macy & Brown’s (2014) “work that reconnects.”

Authors

• Joshua James Russell, Canisius College

• Erin Robinson, Canisius College

• Nancy Rourke, Canisius College

• Susan Margulis, Canisius College