Matching Items (2)
Description
How do writers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, farmers, and practitioners co-create ‘relational foodways’ in different places and times? How does the transformation of scientists’ positionality help navigate food security potential for future generations? This dissertation counter-maps Western and non-Western food knowledges and practices through analysis of diverse seed narratives in two indigenous communities: the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana and MOWA Band of Choctaw Indians of Alabama and farmers’ collectives in southern Italy. Based on three years of interdisciplinary and community-based participatory research, I observed affinities in communities’ stories regarding their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Traditional Local Knowledge (TLK) and foodways. The research questions examine how community memories of relationships with land, ancestors, and beliefs encapsulated in heritage seeds contribute to forming an external innovation space for food security, which evolves through the repetition of seed reproduction cycles. I also examine how land relations in place-embedded narratives were erased from the future of seed by the systemic agricultural industry. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories, Indigenous research methods, and outside-of-academia frameworks, I argue that preserving TEK and TLK empowers community resilience as documented in their community stories regarding climate change and biodiversity. Interviews with community members revealed the important role of seed savers’ and basket weavers’ knowledge protection efforts in developing contemporary innovative models of food sovereignty, especially in the leadership of women passing down generations of local values and culturally enhanced principles of sustainability. This study attempted an interdisciplinary approach to integrate Indigenous epistemologies to envision a break from the colonial past. Mapping traditional foodways allows us to rethink the ontological basis, reconsider the epistemological approaches, and unfold the new narrative picturing the Middle Place where scientists and traditional knowledge holders can come to reimagine humanity’s future relationship to other forms of life, including plants and seeds.
ContributorsMelkozernova, Arina (Author) / Vitullo, Juliann (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Bates, Denise (Committee member) / Ferrando, Serena (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This dissertation is both creative and scholarly, engaging in the technique of "narrative scholarship," an increasingly accepted technique within the field of ecocriticism. The project is framed by my experiences with Spanish and Latino actors as well as activists involved with the 15-M movement in and around Madrid. It takes a "material ecocritical" approach, which is to say that it treats minds, spirits and language as necessarily "bodied" entities, and creates an absolute union between beings and the matter that constructs them as well as their habitat. I apply the lens of Jesper Hoffmeyer's Biosemiotics, which claims that life is at its most essential levels a communicative process. In other words, I will explore how "all matter is 'storied' matter," as well as how the "semiosphere," which is an important concept in biosmiotics, signaling a semiotic environment that predicts and defines all biological bodies/life, the human, the plant and the animal as beings who are made of and involved in semiotic activity, can serve as a basis for union amongst all bodies and provide a model of cooperation rooted in "storytelling." My project aims to embody what Wendy Wheeler describes as ecocriticism's, "syntheses between the sciences and the humanities" It is my strong opinion that creative writing has the power to offer the general public insight into the reasons why new research in biosemiotics is so important to the work that activists are doing to raise awareness of how humans can live responsibly on the only planet that is our home. This will help readers of creative writing and cultural studies scholars understand why they ought to embrace science, especially in literary and cultural studies, as a path to better understanding of the role of the humanities in an increasingly scientifically oriented world.
ContributorsDay, Timothy (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Gutkind, Lee (Committee member) / Flys-Junquera, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016