Felt Places: The Ragged Strength of Campus Learning Garden Networks

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

Abstract

This paper exemplifies the felt, ragged-edged nature of learning garden networks using case studies from the Cultivating Learning Network and informal arts-based coalitions in gardens and other outdoor spaces of learning. The very raggedness of these networks is seen as strength as modes of resistance and regeneration are explored and characterized.

Campus learning gardens are almost always under attack and treated as a threat in the context of the neoliberal university (Ostertag, Gerofsky & Scott, 2016), though they are simultaneously promoted as the ‘poster children’ for university environmental sustainability.

Many of those involved with campus learning gardens are engaged in crucially important contemporary issues in the context of garden-based learning. Work around Indigeneity and reconciliation, climate change, food sovereignty, mental and physical wellbeing, intercultural and transdisciplinary ways to live together, and experiential work in building human/ greater-than-human community are played out in the living laboratories of campus learning gardens.

What supports these gardens and their programs in the face of powerful (and oblivious) institutional forces that are always ready to plow them under to turn land into money? In this theoretical and experiential paper, I propose that strong, informal networks among learning gardens are arising to sustain them as places of inquiry and experimentation.

I am interested in the quality of these networks, as neoliberalism cannot be countered with another neoliberal structure. The effective networks that I have witnessed and participated in are informal and subterranean in nature, closer to mycorrhizal networks than organizational grids. Rather than adopting narratives of accountability, hierarchy and control, these networks function on a distributed model of authority and responsibility. Relationships across conventional institutional boundaries are the norm, with a basis in trust, generosity and abundance, an informal sharing economy, humour, a rejection of hypercompetition, and deep feelings of friendship. These principles arise from interactive observations of the gardens themselves: producing generously and abundantly, providing life-giving habitats for diverse communities, living at a slow, seasonal pace in ecological balance.

Following Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) characterization of the smooth vs. the striated, these garden network structures resemble smooth felted wool more than striated woven cloth. Layers of the network become enmeshed and stronger through pummeling and wear, are heterogenous and multi-textured, and grow in non-linear, unconstrained ways. Like felt, they are not limited by the parallel boundaries of a loom, but have ragged, fractal edges that are difficult to delineate and account for. Fractal edges, on a tidal shoreline, a cloud or a newly-developing piece of felt, have an indeterminacy and immeasurable nature. This fractal raggedness allows for a permeability between what is and what is not part of the network; through bonds of friendship and mutual support, these connections below the surface of things connect with other projects and similarly ‘felt’ places. Fractal, non-linear structures also resonate with Indigenous concepts of territory and waterways in opposition to colonial mentalities of straight lines creating impermeable walls and boundaries (Doolittle, 2018). I propose that these felt places and their non-linear network structures have an intrinsic ragged strength.

Author

• Susan Gerofsky, The University of British Columbia