Molly Doane

This research focuses on how gardeners create and reconstitute meaningful social and natural places (Low 1992) through the “growing and making” (Jepson 2014) that gardening entails. The research looks at how gardens emerge out of and nourish affective social circuits within and among neighborhoods, what concerns circulate within them, and how these circuits leverage neighborhood assets or human “infrastructure” (Elyachar 2010, Latour 2010, Simone 2004, Stewart 1996, 2007) to imagine new futures. The research engages multispecies feminist theorist and biologist Donna Haraway (2016) to explore how gardeners are linked to each other and to non-human species. Do non-human species, such as plants, pollinator insects, and birds, take on a new significance that challenges or remakes gardeners’ own sense of themselves as they engage the environment through gardening? How do ordinary practices like gardening shape the ideas and emotions and selves or “affective lives” (Stewart 2007) of gardeners? How do gardeners create “infrastructures of resonance” (Thompson 2015)—the specific places and social networks comprised of people, plants, and pollinators– that circulate meaning and have the potential to produce new subjectivities and communities?