In Domestic Wild, Franklin Ginn sets out to find a new sense of the wild at the heart of modernity. Inspired by experienced, skilful gardeners, Ginn analyses what happens when plants, animals and people meet in the suburbs of London. Weaving major theories of landscape, memory and nonhuman subjectivity with the practical wisdom of gardeners, this book offers a radical new account of everyday gardening. Amid spectacular horizons of planetary loss, Domestic Wild argues that gardening offers a means to cultivate a renewed sense of intimacy with nature and ourselves.
The history of Italian culture stems from multiple experiences of mobility and migration, which have produced a range of narratives, inside and outside Italy. This collection interrogates the dynamic nature of Italian identity and culture, focussing on the concepts and practices of mobility, memory and translation. It adopts a transnational perspective, offering a fresh approach to the study of Italy and of Modern Languages.
How do poets, writers and cultural critics contend with and represent the garden or their own gardening as they are changed by austerity? Gardening under austerity encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: suburban allotments and zoological gardens, Victory diggers and urban foragers, human gardeners and the unruly more-than-human world. Theorizing the politics, poetics and practices of austerity gardening in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone cultural texts, The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times explores the variegated impact of austerity in conjunction with the representation of the garden in the national context of England in the mid-century, and how garden imagery is embedded within and illuminates the political, economic, and social contexts of literary production.
How is it that, in the course of everyday life, people are drawn away from greenspace experiences that are often good for them? By attending to the apparently idle talk of those who are living them out, this book shows us why we should attend to the processes involved. Develops an original perspective on how greenspace benefits are promoted Shows how greenspace experiences can unsettle the practices of everyday life Draws on several years of field research and over 180 interviews Makes new links between geographies of nature and the study of social practices Uses a focus on social practices to reimagine the research interview Offers a wealth of suggestions for future researchers in this field
Home articulates a ‘critical geography of home’ in which home is understood as an emotive place and spatial imaginary that encompasses lived experiences of everyday, domestic life alongside a wider, and often contested, sense of being and belonging in the world. Engaging with the burgeoning cross-disciplinary interest in home since the first edition was published, this significantly revised and updated second edition contains new research boxes, illustrations, and contemporary examples throughout. It also adds a new chapter on ‘Home and the City’ that extends the scalar understanding of home to the urban. The book develops the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of a critical geography of home, drawing on key feminist, postcolonial, and housing thinkers as well as contemporary methodological currents in non-representational thinking and performance. The book’s chapters consider the making and unmaking of home across the domestic scale – house-as-home; the urban – city-as-home; national – nation-as-home; and homemaking in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Each chapter includes illustrative examples from diverse geographical contexts and historical time periods. Chapters also address some of the key cross-cutting dimensions of home across these scales, including digital connectivity, art and performance, more-than-human constructions of home, and violence and dispossession. The book ends with a research agenda for home in a world of COVID-19. The book provides an understanding of home that has three intersecting dimensions: that material and imaginative geographies of home are closely intertwined; that home, power, and identity are intimately linked; and that geographies of home are multi-scalar. This framework, the examples used to illustrate it, and the intended audience of academics and students across the humanities and social sciences will together shape the field of home studies into the future.
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Second Edition, Fourteen Volume Set embraces diversity by design and captures the ways in which humans share places and view differences based on gender, race, nationality, location and other factors—in other words, the things that make people and places different. Questions of, for example, politics, economics, race relations and migration are introduced and discussed through a geographical lens. This updated edition will assist readers in their research by providing factual information, historical perspectives, theoretical approaches, reviews of literature, and provocative topical discussions that will stimulate creative thinking. Presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive coverage on the topic of human geography Contains extensive scope and depth of coverage Emphasizes how geographers interact with, understand and contribute to problem-solving in the contemporary world Places an emphasis on how geography is relevant in a social and interdisciplinary context
Whether driven by developments in plant science, bio-philosophy, or broader societal dynamics, plants have to respond to a litany of environmental, social, and economic challenges. This collection explores the `work' that plants do in contemporary capitalism, examining how vegetal life is enrolled in processes of value creation, social reproduction, and capital accumulation. Bringing together insights from geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, the contributors contend that attention to the diverse capacities and agencies of plants can both enrich understandings of capitalist economies, and also catalyze new forms of resistance to their logics.
This volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the field of more-than-human studies, bringing together contemporary and essential content from leading authors across the discipline. With attention to the intellectual history of the field, its developments and extensions, its applications and its significance to contemporary society, it presents empirical studies and theoretical work covering long-established disciplines, as well as new writing on art, history, politics, planning, architecture, research methodology and ethics. An elaboration of the various dimensions of more-than-human studies, The Routledge International Handbook of More-than-Human Studies constitutes essential reading for anyone studying or researching in this field.
2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Since their inception in the sixteenth century, botanic gardens have been embroiled with matters of governance. In Postnormal Conservation, Katja Grötzner Neves reveals that, throughout its long history, the botanical garden institution has been both a product and an enabler of modernity and the Westphalian nation-state. Initially intertwined with projects of colonialism and empire building, contemporary botanic gardens have reinvented themselves as environmental governance actors. They are now at the forefront of emerging forms of networked transnational governance. Building on social studies of science that reveal the politicization of science as the producer of contingent, high-stakes, and uncertain knowledge, and the concomitant politicization of previously taken-for-granted science-policy interfaces, Neves contends that institutions like botanic gardens have discursively deployed postnormal science and posthuman precepts to justify their growing involvement with biodiversity conservation governance within the Anthropocene.
Escape is an enticing idea in contemporary cities across the world. Austerity, climate breakdown and spatial stigma have led to retreatist behaviours such as gated communities, enclave urbanism and white flight. By contrast, urban community growing projects are often considered by practitioners and commentators as communal havens in a stressful cityscape. Drawing on ethnographic research in urban growing projects in Glasgow, this book explores the spatial politics and dynamics of community, asking who benefits from such projects and how they relate to the wider city. A timely consideration of localism and community empowerment, the book sheds light on key issues of urban land use, the right to the city and the value of social connection.
