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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
“To Nurture Something That Nurtures You”: Care, Creativity, Class, And The Production Of Urban Environments In Deindustrial Michigan, Megan L. Maurer
“To Nurture Something That Nurtures You”: Care, Creativity, Class, And The Production Of Urban Environments In Deindustrial Michigan, Megan L. Maurer
Theses and Dissertations--Anthropology
In this dissertation I investigate how gardeners and beekeepers in a small, deindustrial city in Michigan used their activities to produce their environments. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I consider what kind of labor gardening is. For residents of Elmwood, gardening was a way to care for households, communities, and ecosystems. Furthermore, this care was performed through a type of creative, material labor that served to address forms of alienation experienced by these individuals. While all sorts of Elmwoodites gardened, they did so in ways that were specific to their experiences of race and class. These experiences, in …