“Nightshade Grows Well Here”: Exploring Rhizomatic Agency with Immigrant Growers in a Community Food Garden

This study explores expansive views on agency and learning, focusing on the coupled assemblages between immigrant growers and more-than-human beings in the context of an urban community food garden.Drawing on the notion of meshwork (Ingold, 2016), we highlight previously displaced people's evolving agentic capacities to navigate the social and geographic contours as dynamic socio-ecological adaptations emerging from the rhizomatic assemblages of food-growing activities, land, bodies and culture.Using an illustrative example of how a tropical edible plant, Nightshade, is grown in a vastly different cold climate by immigrant growers as they try to "root" themselves in a foreign space, we highlight the dynamic correspondence that simultaneously transforms the land and shapes their perspectives.In drawing attention to the relational and processual growth of Nightshade with respect to its surroundings, the study expands on how embodied, affective multi-species entanglements form critical dimensions of human becoming. Conceptualizing agency through attending to rhizomatic interconnections in a community gardenScholarship in the field of Learning Sciences has studied the socially-mediated nature of agency, bringing to fore its constitution in relation to context, position, knowledge and identity (Barton & Tan, 2010;Gebre & Polman, 2020).Rahm et al. (2022) attend to the nonlinear trajectories and affective valences involved in figuring science identities among young women of color through focussing on evolving cultural identities and emotions in relation to both formal and informal educational contexts.Our study takes a similar, yet distinct approach through a focus on more-than-human (MTH) beings (Bang, 2016;Simpson, 2014) in co-creating initiatives that guide growers' sense of agency and belonging.Our study was undertaken in the context of urban community food garden.Broadly, community gardens are promoted as sites that support the well-being of vulnerable groups, aiding their integration into society through food-based socio-ecological connections (McGuire et al., 2022).Such discourses however neglect the agency of the growers and the land in navigating the constraints and possibilities created through the activities.Barron (2017) describes community gardens as socially-produced spaces intersecting with material processes to shape social life.This study explores the process of social emergence of the evolving agency of previously displaced people in relation to their farming activities.The notion of mediated agency involves a dynamic tension between individuals and the material artefacts in terms of the actions that are constrained or enabled by the environment.Latour (2014) perceived agency as distributed across individuals and the materials by treating all human and non-human agents as symmetric nodes/actants across a network.However, later theories emphasized the nature of connections that enables the salience of materials regarded as actant (Sugarman & Martin, 2011).Ingold (2016) for instance uses the term "meshwork" rather than network to call attention to the interplay of forces that result in emergent forms of agency: "The lines of the meshwork are the trails along which life is lived…it is in the entanglement of lines, not in the connecting of points, that the mesh is constituted" (p.81).Ingold (2016) draws on Deleuze and Guattari's conception of a living organism as a bundle of lines intermingling and growing continuously.Deleuze and Guattari (1987) invoke the properties of a rhizome to describe the non-hierarchical, decentralised and structureless processes "produced by the formation of transversal alliances between different and coexisting terms within an open system" (p.10).This ontological shift emphasizes meaning-making along lines of relationship, rather than a superimposition of meaning over matter.Unlike conventional hierarchical models of agency, conceptualization of rhizomatic agency involves attention to the dynamic and co-constitutive nature of relationships which animates the possible sphere of meaning-making and actions.Exploring the agency of immigrant growers through rhizomatic interconnections allows for the growth and shifting salience of the mediating entities, which in turn shape the possibilities and capacities perceived by the growers.An emphasis on agency as emerging through embodied relations with the MTH beings also contributes to the growing scholarship on understanding learning as attending and caring for constitutive interconnectedness between humans and their environment (for review, Vossoughi et al., 2023).Additionally, these discussions offer generative counter-narratives to anthropocentric discourses on sustainability by disrupting the violent dichotomies between social and natural systems, and

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