Affective atmospheres of care in community gardens: Women’s embodied practices of (co)becoming in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

Recent research has highlighted the importance of more-than-representational, more-than-human and feminist theories in the co-constitution of bodies, identities and places. In particular, the notion of affective atmospheres has been used by geographers to better understand the affective forces which are transmitted in place and how they help people to connect to and rework their subjectivities. On the other hand, community gardens have been explored within geography as spaces that foster community connection, social action, and critical approaches to the prevailing socioeconomic system.

In this thesis, I explore 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, this 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 is 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. Applying a feminist lens to the relations and practices that take place in community gardens also assisted me in exploring other aspects of the experience and agency of more-than-humans (including the women) that are also connected to feminist projects of experiential, adventurous, solidaristic, caring and inclusive forms of (co)becoming with the environment.

In my thesis I argue that community gardens are embraced by affective atmospheres co-created by a myriad of entities, which facilitate dynamics of (co)becoming between the volunteers and the place from their embodied interactions, reflecting on participants’ agency and revealing multi-level practices of care (and exclusion). In doing so, this thesis reveals how atmospheres of creativity, safety, tranquility, and empowerment enrol and transform different actors in these gardens given the porosity between bodies and the environment. In the current context of mental health and environmental crises, my focus on the importance of affect and emotions in dynamics of (co)becoming in community gardens reveal the nuances of power struggles in the everyday, and possibilities to rework our relations with ourselves and the other more-than-humans that co-create these atmospheres.