Molly Doane

MOLLY DOANE, University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois, was granted funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Affective Scales of the Anthropocene: Gardening the City.” This project considered urban gardeners as a lens on “affect at the end of the world” to understand how working-class Chicagoans experience, understand and engage with the current political and environmental crisis. How do Chicagoans respond to and understand the epistemic event that is climate change from the perspectives of their own histories and positionalities? In conversation with multi-species theorists, the grantee considered how human/non-human assemblages create forms of dwelling in the world that differ from those posited in Eurocentric discourses, and that can be a source for rethinking culture, politics and multispecies futures in the city.  The research included hundreds of hours of participant observation, action, and activist work in ten community gardens representing Black, Latinx, and immigrant/refugee populations, respectively. Graduate and undergraduate students and the PI conducted more than 100 semi-structured, recorded interviews. The research team included a photographer, and has resulted in three exhibitions, including one at the Field Museum of Natural history in Chicago.