Multispecies community gardening: Inquiring material-discursive anthropocentrism through a Roman gardening experience

Abstract

Positioning my investigation within feminist posthumanist studies, in this article I will focus on the incessant interactions of more-than-human life that co-construct urban spaces. Exploring the activities carried out in a Roman shared urban garden, I will offer a picture of some material-semiotic dimensions and shared agencies that are condensed around vegetal life. I will investigate some multispecies assemblages with wich I entered in interaction during an ethnographic terrain that I carried out between 2017 and 2019. The garden constitutes a clearly multispecies space in which the more-than-human (vegetal and animal) agency in its shared mode is in action in everyday life. The article will emerge as a continuous dialogue between ethnographic fieldnotes, theory, extracts from interviews and analyses. I will begin by presenting the terrain in which I conducted a multispecies ethnography, a self-managed urban garden in the southern periphery of the city. I will then proceed to outline some theoretical and methodological elements. I will thus analyse some of the multispecies relationships that co-build and cross the garden, focusing on the intertwining of material and discursive dimensions. I will report some examples of how this shared relationality is implemented and elaborated by the citizens who take part in it, generating hierarchies that diverge from a fully modern approach but that still maintain degrees of anthropocentrism, while opening imaginative spaces that can inspire further transformations towards multispecies justice.