Affective atmospheres of care in community gardens

In my thesis I explored the embodied (affective, emotional and multisensory) practices of volunteers working in community gardens paying particular attention to the gardens’ materialities and the agency of non-humans (sentient or not) present in these spaces. Adopting a more-than-representational approach, my thesis contributes to current debates around urban green spaces and urban agriculture and to emerging methodological approaches involving affective practices and more-than-humans. Using a qualitative mixed-methods methodology conducted in three community gardens in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, from January to July 2021, I explored the relations emerging from pre-cognitive responses to community gardens’ environments, acknowledging that these relations are also influenced and partially shaped by a reaction to socially constructed discourses and structures. In doing so, my thesis contributes to expanding the scholarship on innovative methodologies which explore embodied and non-discursive forms of knowledge production.

My focus was on exploring how gardening in collective spaces can facilitate subjective meaning-making processes, raise gender awareness, and commit to an ethics of care that incentivise more horizontal and responsible co-existence with other beings, challenging dominant patriarchal and exploitative discourses and practices. I argued that community gardens are embraced by affective atmospheres co-created by the agency of multiple more-than-humans, which facilitate dynamics of (co)becoming between the volunteers and the place from their embodied interactions. The research discloses how atmospheres of creativity, safety, tranquility, and empowerment enrol and transform different actors in these gardens given the porosity between bodies and the environment, reflecting on participants’ agency and revealing multi-level practices of care (and exclusion).