Chili, cress and cosmopolitanism: the moral geographies of a 'refugees welcome' community garden in Germany

Abstract

This thesis argues that the moral geographies (Creswell, 2005) that underpin different ways of ‘approaching’ refugees (Rozakou, 2016) need to be critically examined in research, policy and practice. At core, this work is an ethnographic exploration of the complex relationalities (McNamee & Hosking, 2012) in an inclusive, intercultural community garden in Southern Germany, originally created as a ‘refugees welcome’ project in 2015. The garden sprouted among other ‘welcome projects’ that make use of ‘nature spaces’ to support the inclusion of refugees in their new homes. It explores how the involvement of, with and by refugees, understood here as an everyday socio-material practice (McKenzie & Bieler, 2016), works in a space where people follow the moral imperative to support refugees’ wellbeing, recognition and participation in their host societies.

Furthermore, it pays particular attention to how the encounters and relationships between people are shaped by the interactions with the local ecosystem of plants, soils, animals, water, and more.

I first conducted a mapping review to provide an overview of “nature-based integration” projects (Pitkänen, K., Hellgren, D. et al., 2017) in Germany, Norway and Scotland. Such endeavours offer a variety of activities such as walking, cycling, conservation work or gardening; their aims are to create spaces of encounter between people, involve those who may be excluded, offer learning opportunities, support sustainable living and promote good health. This contextualising overview was followed by an in-depth study of the aforementioned community garden. My ethnographic fieldwork was a practice of engaged observation, participation and listening over the course of eight months, from April to November 2020, with 66 visits to the garden and approximately 270 hours spent there. Based on these visits, as well as on semi-structured recorded conversations with 24 people from the garden, I offer three substantive contributions. First, looking to how this the garden is a space of social heterogeneity and diversity, I find that it can be conceived of as a cosmopolitan canopy (E. Anderson, 2011), with several complexities and paradoxes that form part of this protective umbrella: the cosmopolitan spirit is alive in this place as people try their best to navigate it with goodwill and kindness, and the plants play a significant part in its expression (Myers, 2019). Yet, this place is not neutral. While it works as a retreat from hostilities that people may experience outside, its boundaries are permeable, and segregation inside the canopy points to it being honeycombed by power dynamics and instances of control. Second, focussing on tensions that emerged in the garden, I observe that people may co-create this space (Cornwall, 2008) as long as their practices do not collide with the garden’s wider ethos. This becomes visible as the practices of people with refugee biographies rub against the garden’s ideals, which can be seen as a way of testing and confirming their equality (Bingham, Biesta, & Rancière, 2010). What the stories reveal to me, too, is that the nature-cultures (Haraway, 2008) that people’s practices are grounded in fundamentally form part of the creation of hierarchies. Third, looking to people’s homemaking practices (Ahmed, 2003; Obeid, 2013; Ralph & Staeheli, 2011) in this space, I discover that all people in the garden are engaged in unique ways of creating homes, of establishing continuity in their biographies. People in diaspora specifically (re)create familiarity through a politics of presence (Obeid, 2013) and the expression of their yearnings for home. The shared joy of making and watching life grow, as the plants mirror and speak in their own language about vital continuity (Raphaely & Orbach, 2022), connects all gardeners in this space.

I conclude that through this garden, we get to see what inclusion really is about: to be included means to be seen as a complex, multifaceted person (Gümüşay, 2020), to have one’s multiple cultural ties appreciated, and to be able to connect with others, both inside and across intersecting belongings. To be included means to find a home, a space that allows for a person to be, to breathe, and to exchange with others in a climate of recognition and respect. Through my power-critical reflections on cosmopolitanism, participation and equality, and the dynamics between ‘the host’ and ‘the newcomer’ (Heins & Unrau, 2018; Rozakou, 2016) in homemaking, my thesis speaks to literature in education and sociology, in particular to works that explore complexities of migration, integration and community-making in pluralistic societies. As I consider social complexities in entanglement with the more-than-human world, my work supports an ecological comprehension of these ties. The empirical findings allow me to offer three propositions to researchers, governments and policy makers, as well as to (educational) practitioners in civic spaces that seek to ‘approach’ refugees: First, we need to cultivate the joy of cultural expression to be able to harvest the wisdom of socially heterogeneous communities. Second, we need to sow and nurture solidarity to accomplish lateral relationships, which involves active engagement with the moral geographies of our doings to recognise the risks and potentials around the boundaries they create. Last, we need to raise relationality in both research and practice to ensure that we stay surprised about the injustices we encounter and are complicit with on an everyday basis. These three invitations hold the opportunity to contribute to the (re)making and (re)shaping of worlds that allow for people to live together in active recognition of one another and in careful consideration of divergent nature-cultures.