Banerjee, PallaviLognon, Riann2024-08-152024-08-152024-08-12Lognon, 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.https://hdl.handle.net/1880/119417In 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.enUniversity 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.newcomer youthbelongingcommunity gardeningplace-makingyouth immigrationrefugee studiesstorytellingcommunity-based researchEthnic and Racial StudiesPublic and Social Welfaremaster thesis