Re-Imagining Homes in New Lands: Gardening and Anti-Racist Storytelling With Newcomer Youth of Colour

Lognon, Riann

Re-Imagining Homes in New Lands: Gardening and Anti-Racist Storytelling With Newcomer Youth of Colour

dc.contributor.advisor	Banerjee, Pallavi
dc.contributor.author	Lognon, Riann
dc.contributor.committeemember	Sengupta, Pratim
dc.contributor.committeemember	Patterson, Matt
dc.date	2024-11
dc.date.accessioned	2024-08-15T21:41:35Z
dc.date.available	2024-08-15T21:41:35Z
dc.date.issued	2024-08-12
dc.description.abstract	In this master’s thesis, I explore how community gardening contributes to place-making and belonging among newcomer youth of colour. While existing research largely focuses on community gardening with newcomer adults and their ways of creating home during migration, there's a notable gap concerning newcomer youth's place-making practices. This research addresses this gap by employing feminist qualitative research methods with a co-design methodology in the centre; collaborating with 18 newcomer youth of colour within a community-based research initiative, we co-created a community garden (YARI-Collective, 2024). The co-design methodology draws on critical Southern feminist axiological orientations toward deep care (Banerjee, Khandelwal, & Sanyal, 2022) and a Southern moral imaginary (Banerjee, Chacko, & Korsha, 2022). This approach resists the marginalization of newcomer youth gardeners by centering their voices in garden design decisions and within a historical context of colonialism that implicates host countries of global north in their displacement. Attending to the politically and experientially contested nature of newcomer community gardens (Strunk & Richardson, 2019; Tsu, 2021), I found that home and a sense of belonging among newcomer youth of colour emerged in the co-designed garden in four key ways. First, in centering stories of home, a collaborative approach to knowledge production that subverted neoliberal and paternalistic models of newcomer ‘deficiency’ emerged in the garden. Second, a sense of community emerged in the garden through the multiplicity of the space as engendered through re-embodying parts of home and practices of community that have been discouraged elsewhere in Canada. Third, embodied and sensorial connections to land facilitated the surfacing of memories and ways of being from home that resist the erasure of newcomer youth of colour’s subjectivities, as well as the erasure and fragmentation of land as an object of colonial dispossession. Finally, the public engagements around the garden amplified the unsilencing of newcomer youth gardeners’ voices beyond the immediate community of the research collective. In conclusion, this thesis critiques neoliberal and colonial views of newcomer gardening and integration as linear and individualistic, following instead the re-orientations offered by newcomer youth gardeners toward collective care and dignity.
dc.identifier.citation	Lognon, R. (2024). Re-imagining homes in new lands: gardening and anti-racist storytelling with newcomer youth of colour (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/1880/119417
dc.language.iso	en
dc.publisher.faculty	Graduate Studies
dc.publisher.institution	University of Calgary
dc.rights	University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.
dc.subject	newcomer youth
dc.subject	belonging
dc.subject	community gardening
dc.subject	place-making
dc.subject	youth immigration
dc.subject	refugee studies
dc.subject	storytelling
dc.subject	community-based research
dc.subject.classification	Ethnic and Racial Studies
dc.subject.classification	Public and Social Welfare
dc.title	Re-Imagining Homes in New Lands: Gardening and Anti-Racist Storytelling With Newcomer Youth of Colour
dc.type	master thesis
thesis.degree.discipline	Sociology
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Calgary
thesis.degree.name	Master of Arts (MA)
ucalgary.thesis.accesssetbystudent	I do not require a thesis withhold – my thesis will have open access and can be viewed and downloaded publicly as soon as possible.