Co-designing and Documenting a Community Garden with Newcomer Youth


Riann Lognon, University of Calgary

In this paper, we present how a community garden co-designed with 15 newcomer youth of color became a site for anti-racist storywork, and reimaginings of homes and gardens left behind as part of a community-engaged research initiative - the Youth Anti-Racism Integration (YARI)-Collective. YARI-Collective is a critical intersectional collaborative research project dedicated to centering the lived experiences of immigrant and refugee newcomer youth to re-imagine pathways towards more equitable futures in their resettlement journeys. Applying a Southern theoretical framework that acknowledges the geopolitical and social histories shaping the circumstances of the youths’ migration (Espiritu and Duong, 2018), this paper seeks to push beyond the paradigm of ‘culturally appropriate’ programming in community organizations and examine the potential decolonial and non-neoliberal aspects of community gardening with newcomers by creating a co-designed land-based project as a conduit for anti-racist and generative storytelling (Banerjee and Connell 2018, Banerjee et al., 2022). Throughout the season, we engaged in co-design as a methodology, in which participating newcomer youths’ voices were centered as we co-generated a gardening space. The co-design process fostered equitable participation among researchers and newcomer youth through iterative designing that is meaningful for all collaborators within their lifeworlds, expertise, and disciplinary focus. Centering a Southern feminist ethics of care (Banerjee et al., 2022), namely through the framework of deep care, we envisioned gardening work and the garden space as a site to express and negotiate individual and collective experiences. Banerjee et al. (2022) ground the concept of deep care in the care ethics and care labor taken on by marginalized communities in India because of the majoritarian oppression and disenfranchisement they experience. Deep care then is a praxis that orients care towards social and political action to center the voices and concerns of those who are invisibilised through majoritarianism. As research-facilitators, we attended closely to the youth narratives of forced migration and transnational displacement, iteratively generating ideas of “what works” for the youth participants and then collaborating on embodied engagements (for example, watering plants, sowing seeds and herbs, harvesting) and representational activities (for example, creation of artworks, creative re-imagination of the physical space) in and about the garden space. In the process of creating a garden together, the lives of the newcomer youth were reflected in the garden as it grew into a living representation of their stories of migration, their memories of homes and gardens in their homelands, and their hopes for our shared futures. To demonstrate how co-designing facilitated this storywork, we will present an analysis of the documentary film “Days in Shade and Sun”, shot in the garden throughout the season by team members in collaboration with newcomer youth, that capture the newcomer youths’ profound explorations of migration, identity, and belonging through stories shared during designing and growing of the garden. The explorations offer axiological re-orientations (Bang et al., 2016) from the perspectives of newcomer immigrant and refugee youth of color to what it means to belong to a community garden in the Global North. As explicated through the framework of deep care, these re-orientations demonstrate ways in which the various embodied engagements, representational activities and the storywork associated with the garden counter systematic erasures of subjectivities of the marginalized youth of color and center dignity and solidarity in spaces typically associated with a sense of othering.

Non-presenting authors: Megha Sanyal, University of Calgary; Santanu Dutta, University of Calgary; Pallavi Banerjee, University of Calgary; Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary; Newcomer Youth Research Team, University of Calgary

This paper will be presented at the following session: