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Composting the City: Urban Farming in the Ethnographic Moment
Abel, Matthew William
Abel, Matthew William
Abstract
This thesis outlines the social texture of an urban agriculture project: City Leaf Farm in Washington, DC. Drawing on field notes and interviews recorded through ethnographic research, this study outlines the everyday patterns of work and play that constitute the urban agriculture project, as well as the informant and researcher's shared ethnographic moment. By focusing on the positive existence of City Leaf Farm as a space, this paper is juxtaposed with an evaluative approach to urban agriculture research, which conceptualizes cultivars and their social existence in terms of their solution to utilitarian scarcities and public issues. The acknowledgement of this positive existence is shown to have implications for scientific understandings of urban governance: far from managing scarcity, as the term food desert might connote, governance at City Leaf Farm consists of managing surpluses of social energy, volunteer labor, and grant funds. Contrary to a theory of social entrepreneurship, management, and the labor that it necessitates, do not go away.
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2016-04-01
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Anthropology
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