The Anthropology of Community Gardens: Sustainability, Wellbeing, and More-than-human transformation 

This seminar explores community gardens through the lens of psychological anthropology, focusing on how practices of care, creativity, and cultivation shape subjectivities, relationships, and experiences of well-being. Rather than approaching community gardens and related initiatives primarily as ecological solutions, the course examines them as affective, ethical, and collaborative practices through which people rework everyday life, social relations, and modes of coexistence. At the center of the seminar are four key books/texts: The Well-Gardened Mind by Sue Stuart-Smith, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Pathways to Utopia by Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, and collaborative writings on permaculture gardens in Timor-Leste by Eugenio Lemos, Thomas Stodulka, and others.

From a psychological-anthropological perspective, these works offer complementary insights into how practices of cultivation, attention, and reciprocity shape inner life, emotional resilience, and ethical orientations toward others. They invite us to consider how well-being emerges not as an individual state, but as a relational and processual achievement grounded in practices of care, imagination, and responsibility.

We ask: How do community gardening initiatives in urban and rural settings, prisons, and psychiatric institutions foster particular affective atmospheres, modes of belonging, and forms of collective agency? How are experiences of well-being, hope, or exhaustion negotiated within such projects? And how do participants cultivate meaningful relations with others, with themselves, and with more-than-human presences through everyday practices?

Drawing on ethnographic studies and students’ own engagements, the course examines how practices of commoning, care, and creative intervention become sites of psychosocial transformation, while also attending to tensions, exclusions, and the limits of such initiatives in contexts marked by inequality and precarity. Students are encouraged to explore their own affective and sensory engagements in gardens and to develop forms of ethnographic writing that attend to atmosphere, embodiment, and relationality.

Learning objectives:

• Develop an advanced understanding of key concepts in psychological anthropology (affect, well-being, care, embodiment)
• Analyze community gardens as sites of psychosocial and relational transformation
• Critically engage with relational and processual approaches to well-being
• Reflect on ethical and methodological challenges in researching lived experience and collaborative practices
• Produce an original, theoretically grounded piece of writing based on seminar themes

Prerequisites: Prior coursework in social and cultural anthropology; familiarity with ethnographic methods is expected.

Kurs im HIS-LSF