Community Gardens On the Cutting Edge

The Mellon Summer Research Program’s theme for this year is called, “Scholarship on the Cutting Edge.” This did not particularly strike me at first, but within three weeks of my research, it began to speak some volume to me.

On the cutting edge means something that is ‘up to date’ or ‘trendy.’ When I first thought about it, it felt almost like an insult to the academic field. Why do media outlets, the general public, and gradually academia only care about what is current or what is popular? It feels as though it deludes us from leaving our comfort zone and that taking a few steps backward is forbidden. If academia must constantly be restrained from this ‘deconstructionism’ mindset, it loses its potential to develop fully and provides a multi-layer of complex insight. It is like saying one can only do something in a particular way, which means authenticity is lost.

Understanding the world and critically analyzing it requires a mixture of old and new.

So how did my research proposal get approved? A community garden on one hand symbolizes this urgency for a movement to go back to the past, as it urges one to trace back to one’s root. It calls for a departure from the modern-technological world one lives in–the complete opposite of ‘cutting edge’.

However, as I slowly began to be engrossed with my readings, the theme ‘on the cutting edge’ means something new to me, and even further, it pushes me to think about my research differently. Community garden on the other hand is, in fact, on the cutting edge.

You may or may not know, but community gardens used to be funded by the federal government as an emergency relief program. Yes, those victory gardens back then after and during WWII was actually created to provide adequate food for local communities rather than just a symbolic entity. Overtime, the creation of community gardens reflected the various concerns that were being faced during that particular time period. Interestingly enough, the benefits of having a community garden remains the same, but advocates would portray it in a way that sounds appealing and timing to the general public. My conclusion is that from one generation to the next, people are socially constructed to think a particular way or view things in a particular light. However, claims have to start from the fundamentals, no matter what. For community gardens, the urgency for them never died down, it was just constructed in a different way as society developed. It shows that no matter how much we attempt to neglect our natural world, part of us, the primitive part of us, holds on to it subconsciously. We forever belong to Earth.

As I am gradually developing what the proposal will look like, it only becomes clear that the establishment of a community garden on campus calls for a ‘movement.’ We need to get students, faculty members, administrators, and the citizens of Worcester excited. We need to begin a movement that calls for the necessity of a community garden–that is on the cutting edge. The cutting edge symbolizes a movement. It symbolizes the ways and means of stirring controversy and momentum, which calls for ideas of the past and present to be integrated as one. I was naive to be misguided that deconstructionism is only used to reflect post modernism ideas, though that could be the case for some scholars, but for other scholars and myself on the cutting edge is exactly about going backward. We begin our understanding from the ‘basics’ to create something entirely different. It is not about trying to overthrow the old ideas, but it is about transforming and restructuring it to form something that will move people—get people talking—get people excited—get people to break away from their comfort zone, and instead stand on the edge with all the anxiety, fear, determination, and readiness.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2014 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.