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Date of lecture: November 11th, 2024
“Labor and Care in the Landscape of the Local: Migrant farm labor and diverse economies in Community Supported Agriculture”
Abstract:
The objective of my dissertation research in human geography has been to engage in spaces of New Jersey’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in order to understand and make visible the lived experience of migrant farmworkers within local agricultural economy. I employ mapping in this project as part of the performative practice that diverse economies research seeks to do in order to, as Gerda Roelvink suggests, “open up a politics of economic possibility, not close it down,” and (hopefully) to bring into being, through making visible, design for generating further care in the space of CSA. I use the term ‘deep mapping’ to describe the concept and practice of exploratory layering of geographic, spatial, temporal, personal, social (and sometimes imaginary) information. The deep map may be read as a sort of palimpsest in which multiple aspects of labor and CSA as phenomena can be deciphered simultaneously. As a mode of critical cartography, deep mapping holds the space for visualization of narratives and livelihood experiences that are on the one hand bound by time and place, and, on the other, refuse to be bounded by either. This particular research method is utilized in order to visually address what migrant labor looks like in a manner that strives to avoid a reductionist representation, and rather seeks to present multiple and authentic engagements with the physical and economic space of CSA.
