“Getting by without progress requires a good deal of feeling around with our hands.” (Tsing 278)

Dear Fellow Tenders,

Welcome to our Community Garden—grab a hand tool and get ready to dig in. I forge this space as a landscape of possible revelations, not with a spirit of discovery, however, but rather with the goal of honing skills of noticing, considering, trying, and actually doing. Meander with me through this field of ideas, as I look for where they converge, bristle, flow, and bloom. This genealogical project moves the representational imagery of significant relations from the realm of trees, unified by a singular core, to the garden, where a diversity of inhabitants come into constellation through interest, care, and (to a certain extent) will. The garden presents a complex, situatedly dispersed site for place and place-making, in keeping with Magdalena Górska’s concept situated dispersal, which she uses to understand knowledge production as, “both situated and intertextual, “ inscribed with politics, “both situated and structural.” (56). Foucault describes a garden as a heterotopia, “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” (6) Both an artificial container for diverse occupants, with the attendant violence of inclusion, as well as a home for multispecies intimacies, a garden’s inhabitants are both displaced and emplaced in a context where non-innocent entanglements flourish.

“Notice that flourishing will continue to be an undecided and in-process norm. Norms that proliferate nonproductive flourishing for others are better than norms that harm them or deny them well-being.” (Shotwell 155)

“…flourishing is, fundamentally, well-being at the individual, species, and community levels. (Cuomo 62)…When I use flourishing as a goal for open normative, I mean it to name the contingent, without-guarantees, partially shared world that recognizes both ethical entanglement and irreducible difference.” (Shotwell 155)

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“…instead of the question of who, and what, we are, we need to go deeper into an investigation of how we come up with answers to the questions.” (da Silva 104)

“These string figures are thinking as well as making practices, pedagogical practices and cosmological performances.” (Haraway 14)

Why are we in a garden? A garden is a place where making a mess is essential for encouraging life. If, as Eva Svedmark notes, “dirt is ‘matter out of place,’” a garden is a home for dirt. (55) It is a place where odd things live together to tell stories of struggle, survival, and beauty. I call this a Community Garden because it is borne of the collective thinking that we have done over the past few months, and because I hope to make it a space where you, my fellow gardeners, can actually populate and tend to the idea beds together. LaMonda Horton-Stallings insists that “research aesthetics are as important as research methods and ethics,” and I propose this digital and material garden as an aesthetic, methodological, and ethical way to engage in collective research that might disrupt/disturb the siloing tendencies elicited by the disciplined expectations of the neoliberal university. (6) 

This project takes up calls for undisciplined, anti-disciplinary, and trans-disciplinary work in order to undo and re-figure human/ecological ontologies over time, in space. It is virtual and it is real. Though it does not align fully with Donna Haraway’s witty linguistic frame, the Community Garden resonates with her SF modalities—Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far—a frame to play with ideas in liminal temporalities and creative presences. By cultivating a digital garden, I hope to practice engaging with ideas to see how they blossom and transform, rather than to fabricate a product to be evaluated for its novelty or finesse. As Anna Tsing posits, reflecting on her work with devotees to matsutake mushrooms and their ecosystems, “What if we imagined intellectual life as a peasant woodland, a source of many useful products emerging in unintentional design?” (286) How might gardening be a feminist research method? Tsing brings attention to the peasant woodland in contrast to other cultivated landscapes, such as plantations—sites of cultivation bear the traces of imperialism and colonialism, slavery and salvage capitalism, displacement and ecological ruination. Even so, Tsing’s mushrooms, Haraway’s chthonic ones, Wynter’s new science of the word impel me to take up my trowel and keep digging, keep planting, keep clearing, and let my garden grow.

“So I have to be realistic and say how can I expect people whose discipline is their identity to accept this hybrid model? When what they / we are being faced with is the total removal of their discipline as an autonomous field of inquiry? But then think of the dazzling creativity of the alternative challenge that would be opened up!” (Wynter 17)

“Twentieth-century scholarship, advancing the modern human conceit, conspired against our ability to notice the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds.” (Tsing 22)

“—here we should be mindful of the disciplinary discourses of natural scarcity…” (McKittrick 11)

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“A model is a work object; a model is not the same kind of thing as a metaphor or analogy. A model is worked, and it does work. A model is a miniature cosmos, in which a biologically curious Alice in Wonderland can have tea with the Red Queen and ask how this world works, even as she is worked by the complex-enough, simple-enough world.” (Haraway 63)

This garden is virtual and real at the same time. It is a model, as Haraway describes above—a way to “ask how this world works” that takes work to figure out and tend to, and models a way that things could work. It is both speculative and practicable. It lives online, here, as well as in soil (see Actually Doing). It invites you to notice as things change and grow, and to contribute to overall well-being of the system and its inhabitants. Its inhabitants are people, plants, ideas, totems, visions, code.

“At the heart of the practices I am advocating are arts of ethnography and natural history. The new alliance I propose is based on commitments to observation and fieldwork—and what I call noticing.” (Tsing 160)

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