Reconnecting Lives to the Land: Nurturing a Deep Dialogue in Civic Agriculture

MA University of Hawaii at Manoa 2005Includes bibliographical references (leaves 250–257).The argument for a new kind of 'holistic' community dialogue is simple; many planners and educators increasingly agree that too much of "planning" has been dominated by economic variables. Those who are interested in issues of substantive small-scale democracy, land stewardship, and environmental, economic, and social sustainability have recognized the importance of including issues of identity - of culture, values, emotions, and spirituality in the planning process (Thomashow 2002, and Forester 1999). Community planning understands that as people become more aware of their surroundings and more self-reflective as to how they belong in relation to a community of 'others' they become more likely to engage themselves in civic activities. This community of 'others' can include people as well as the broader 'community' of plants, wildlife, soils, waters, and landscapes (Hannum 1995). In addition, many community planners recognize that the significance of this idea of 'becoming more aware' is a result of the underlying necessity of not simply having "knowledge" of one's homeplace but rather creating a "learning culture" in which the dynamics of attentiveness are fueled by a mutual desire to know and care for the whole of a place (Kauffman 1980). Thus, planners draw out people's thoughts, fears, and desires in regard to their local homeplace in an attempt to not only understand a given situation in 'local' terms but also to create, essentially, a "new social reality through discourse that encourages and supports learning" (Forester 1999, 126). Similarly, I began work in South Jersey by speaking with key regional residents about particular initiatives in Burlington County - classes, workshops, community outreach - but my ultimate goal has not been to assess these as individual projects. Instead, I have attempted to set the stage for continued participatory community negotiation - a public "planning through learning" - that begins with South Jersey residents challenging together what, why, and how they 'know' and 'feel' about their farms, foods, and physical landscapes. I see this "planning through learning" or "learning through planning," as a form of cultural dialectics and identity building that speaks to the situation of agriculture in ways that have the potential to prompt a devotion to 'place'. Hence emerge clear civic potentials: the possibility to promote active, communal land stewardship, attentiveness to development, landscape, and 'community' and a substantive local democracy. This depiction of my work should make my general research concern quite clear; effectively, the 'problem' I have sought to remedy is the need to identify a planning process a way forward - by which regions like Southern New Jersey can become sensitive to the idea of "wholeness." To begin to address this broader concern, this thesis examines the meanings, possibilities and roles of dialogue-based, cultural-learning techniques. Although this work is of potential relevance to all world regions, and although all regions are in some way agriculturally relevant, I want to stress that my research is particularly designed for regions of so-called western "developed market economies," and for suburban-urban localities that define themselves in relation to farming. This focus is not accidental. It stems from a long line of authors and scholars who have consistently insisted that what is really needed in terms of the management of modern socio-environmental problems are deep shifts in the hegemonic "Western" (corporate/consumer/industrial) world-view that resonates from and within the cultural milieu of these areas (Orr 1992). However, I do not wish to purport that all that is 'western,' industrial, and corporate in such suburban-urban localities is inherently wrong, or anti-ecological, and all that is local, small, and 'alternative' is here inherently sustainable and right. In this thesis I urge for a questioning of all of the values and systems of belief that are normally taken for granted. I offer the idea that a crucial yet much ignored strategy of change is the advancement of a culture of civic engagement that is rooted in the land, but I do not pretend to know exactly what such a culture would include. I explore how local people in suburban South Jersey receive the idea of using dialogue to further the civic potentials of agriculture, and specifically how they envision agriculture as a cultural framework or medium through which to further communal "ecological" thought. The main question of the research is as follows: To what practical extent do South Jersey educators (focusing on higher and community education) find legitimacy with the suggestion that we can use local agriculture as a foundation for deepening our sense of place and stewardship

Mobilising bodies: Visceral identification in the Slow Food movement

This paper introduces a visceral take on the role of identity in social movement mobilisation. The authors emphasise how identity goes beyond cognitive labels to implicate the entire minded-body. It is suggested that political ideas, beliefs and self definitions require a bodily kind of resonance in order to activate various kinds of environmental and social activism. The authors refer to this bodily resonance as \u27visceral processes of identification\u27 and, through empirical investigation with the Slow Food (SF) movement, they reveal specific instances of such processes at work. Examining SF in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Berkeley, California, USA, the authors ask how SF comes to feel in the bodies of members and non-members and they interrogate the role that feelings play in the development of activism(s). Bodies are shown to both align with movements\u27 socio-political aims and (re)create them. The account provides a means for shifting recent social theoretical attention to bodied/material life to a broad application in political geography, political ecology and social movement theory. © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2010

Better than text? Critical reflections on the practices of visceral methodologies in human geography:Introduction

This co-authored intervention discusses themes on the thinking and doing of visceral research. ‘Visceral’ is taken here as that relating to, and emerging from, bodily, emotional and affective interactions with the material and discursive environment. There has recently been a distinct and necessary turn within the social sciences, particularly in human geography, towards the need for more viscerally-aware research practices. Building on such work, this collective intervention by leading visceral scholars offers two key contributions: first, it critically examines visceral geography approaches by considering their methodological contributions, and suggests improvements and future research pathways; and second, the authors extend recent visceral geography debates by examining how to conduct this type of research, providing reflections from their own experiences on the practicalities and challenges of implementing visceral methods. These observations are taken from a diverse range of research contexts - for example, from gender violence and community spaces, to the politics of ‘good eating’ in schools and social movements (e.g. Slow Food) - and involve a similarly diverse set of methods, including body-map storytelling, cooking and sharing meals, and using music to ‘attune’ researchers’ bodies to nonhuman objects. In short, this collective intervention makes important and original contributions to the recent visceral turn in human geography, and offers critical insights for researchers across disciplines who are interested in conceptually and/or practically engaging with visceral methods

Biosocial medicine: Biology, biography, and the tailored care of the patient

Biosocial Medicine, with its emphasis on the full integration of the person's biology and biography, proposes a strategy for clinical research and the practice of medicine that is transformative for the care of individual patients. In this paper, we argue that Biology is one component of what makes a person unique, but it does not do so alone. Biography, the lived experience of the person, integrates with biology to create a unique signature for each individual and is the foundational concept on which Biosocial Medicine is based. Biosocial Medicine starts with the premise that the individual patient is the focus of clinical care, and that average results for "ideal" patients in population level research cannot substitute for the "real" patient for whom clinical decisions are needed. The paper begins with a description of the case-based method of clinical reasoning, considers the strengths and limitations of Randomized Controlled Trials and Evidence Based Medicine, reviews the increasing focus on precision medicine and then explores the neglected role of biography as part of a new approach to the tailored care of patients. After a review of the analytical challenges in Biosocial Medicine, the paper concludes by linking the physician's commitment to understanding the patient's biography as a critical element in developing trust with the patient

Geographies of food: 'Afters'

This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews – plus others whose work was not but should have been featured – were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about – and in the process review – other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations were coded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aiming to convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research within and beyond geography. <br/