493 - Special Session. Sociology of Community Gardens

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

With the growing trendiness of urban agriculture, community gardens are gaining visibility in the public consciousness, often imagined as spaces of feel-good, get-your-hands-dirty, community-building oases amidst gritty and conflictual cities or atomizing suburbs. But while community gardens can provide respite and an alternative to prevailing social relations, they are inextricably part of neighborhoods and social structures around them. Whether sharing a piece of land or neighboring small plots, community gardeners reinvent their relationship to the natural and social environment, negotiate norms, perform and challenge social roles, and grapple with power structures within and beyond their gardens. Sociologists are well positioned to explore the workings of community gardens in a way that shed lights on central sociological questions, from the formation of solidarity and community, to microdynamics of social reproduction and inequality, to successes and challenges of social movements. Yet, sociologists lag behind geographers and anthropologists in seizing the opportunity to study community gardens. In this session, we bring together sociologists who study community gardens from a diversity of perspectives, beginning the conversation on the unique contributions of sociology to the study of community gardens – and the contribution that such a study can make to sociological subfields ranging from social movements to race and ethnicity to urban and community sociology. The session promises to provide a stimulating mix of original research and theoretical discussion that would push the study of community gardens in new and exciting directions.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizer

• Sofya Aptekar, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Presider

• Sofya Aptekar, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Individual Presentations

• Men’s Search for Home in Black and Latino Community Gardens in South Los Angeles - Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California

• Whose Food, Whose City: Vignettes from Oakland, California - Alison Hope Alkon, University of the Pacific

• What is “New” about Growing Food in the City? A Historical Perspective on Urban Cultivation in New Orleans - Yuki Kato, Georgetown University

• We Are Not Weeds! Planned Shrinkage, Broken Windows, and Gentrification in the Community Gardens of East New York - Justin Sean Myers, Marist College