Visceral Encounters: A Political Ecology of Urban Land, Food, and Housing in Dubuque, Iowa

Carrie Chennault, Laura Klavitter and Lynn Sutton
Additional contact information
Carrie Chennault: Department of Sociology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA
Laura Klavitter: Washington Neighborhood Community Garden, Dubuque, IA 52001, USA
Lynn Sutton: Dubuque Community Activist, Dubuque, IA 52001, USA

Social Sciences, 2019, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-25

Abstract: Through a praxis of co-authorship between a university scholar and two community gardeners/organizers/activists, this article showcases the ways in which knowledge, practices, and relationalities emergent in community gardens in Dubuque, Iowa USA directly engage with the politics of food, land, and housing. The authors engage in co-authorship across university and community boundaries to ontologically reframe knowledge production and draw critical attention to the everyday livelihoods and political ecologies experienced within marginalized communities. We use extended conversations and interviews to analyze the food, land, and housing issues that emerge in the context of uneven racial relations and neighborhood revitalization. We then organize our analysis using a Political Ecology of the Body (PEB) framework to consider how people’s bodily, emotional, and social lives impact their relationalities with food, gardening, and neighborhood spaces. Our findings show that community gardening efforts are transforming the Washington and North End neighborhoods—even if these changes appear to outsiders to be small-scale or difficult to measure—while also calling attention to the anti-oppression and anti-racism work that remains to be done. Our co-authorship demonstrates how community gardeners and university partners can work together to contest histories of marginalization and foster more socially just relations.

Keywords: community gardens; feminist methodology; co-authorship; political ecology of the body; food insecurity; racism; land politics; affordable housing; neighborhood revitalization; gentrification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/4/122/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/4/122/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:8:y:2019:i:4:p:122-:d:224171

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().