PatchWORK · A PATCH OF LAND: RE-CONSIDERING WORK AS A LIFE-SUSTAINING PRACTICE IN THE POST-SOCIALIST SEMI-PERIPHERY THROUGH INTERGENERATIONAL CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

A PATCH OF LAND: RE-CONSIDERING WORK AS A LIFE-SUSTAINING PRACTICE IN THE POST-SOCIALIST SEMI-PERIPHERY THROUGH INTERGENERATIONAL CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

The world’s dominant agribusinesses and cultivation practices of over-exploitation are one of the main causes of altering the earth’s surface, deforestation, desertification, and loss of biodiversity. Anthropologist Anna Tsing characterizes this condition as “patchy Anthropocene […] the uneven conditions of more-than-human livability in landscapes increasingly dominated by industrial forms” (2019: S186). In European semi-periphery, on the other hand, traditional agricultural land use contributes to biodiversity, which points to relational, affective, and material entanglements of human work, social relations and the natural environment. In this context, the reforestation of meadows and cultivated fields, and the associated loss of biodiversity is not so much induced by over-exploitation of land as it is brought about by deagrarisation and abandonment of land cultivation. This points to a different kind of “patchiness of the world” (Tsing 2015: 4), whereby work related to subsistence practices can be understood as a central activity placing humans in a relationship with other living things, both human and more-than-human. PatchWORK applies an interdisciplinary approach to document local subsistence practices and knowledge by exploring intergenerational childhood memories to further our understanding about the relational ethic of entangled lives. The project employs an innovative interdisciplinary methodology that includes memory sharing workshops, sensory walks, life-history interviews, citizen science, and secondary analysis from previous ethnographic fieldwork. The main objective of PatchWORK project is to bring together interdisciplinary expertise to document local practices and knowledge of sustainable land cultivation in the post-socialist semi-periphery through children’s intergenerational experiences that point to a relational ethic for entangled lives and mutual thriving. Within the overall project objective, the following research objectives were identified: 1. To map contemporary sustainable practices and document intergenerational stories of children’s participation in land cultivation, and uncover how knowledge, relations and ethics of land care unfold through these practices. 2. To examine intergenerational childhood memories of working on the land and hitherto related more-than-human entanglements, embedded knowledge of land care, and their relations to contemporary sustainable practices. 3. To analyse collected sustainable practices of land cultivation through the prism of intersectionality: how do gender relations and social class relate to children’s participation and the ethics of sustainable practices (e.g. a gendered division of work and care), and what are the implications for more-than-human reciprocity. 4. To theorize work on the land through a post-socialist de-colonial approach, that will allow me to propose a meaning and value of work beyond the capitalist understanding, pointing to work as a central human activity which sustains life, shapes and is shaped by environmental knowledge, ethics, and affect. 5. To disseminate and communicate stories and memories of sustainable land cultivation promoting intergenerational dialogue and knowledge transmission, and to present practices and knowledge, which can be brought into dominant discussions about sustainable futures.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз