Cargando…

Diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: Negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in Lithuania

While scholars have developed a nuanced understanding of agriculture as a form of care, the temporal organization of farming practices has received little consideration. Focusing on how farmers organize and experience agriculture, we track diverging approaches to care work on urban farms in Vilnius,...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Mincytė, Diana, Bartkienė, Aistė, Bikauskaitė, Renata
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier Ltd. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7347469/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32834078
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.06.006
_version_ 1783556591222521856
author Mincytė, Diana
Bartkienė, Aistė
Bikauskaitė, Renata
author_facet Mincytė, Diana
Bartkienė, Aistė
Bikauskaitė, Renata
author_sort Mincytė, Diana
collection PubMed
description While scholars have developed a nuanced understanding of agriculture as a form of care, the temporal organization of farming practices has received little consideration. Focusing on how farmers organize and experience agriculture, we track diverging approaches to care work on urban farms in Vilnius, Lithuania. Our ethnographic fieldwork and interviews show how Lithuanian urban farmers are struggling to reconcile the civic ideals of the global urban farming movement with their historical understandings of care for specific plants and the land. Whereas the older generation views farming as kinship-based individualized work focusing on particular plants and garden ecologies, the younger generation approaches it as a way to unwind, mediate, and build a community. These different perspectives on farming translate into divergent temporalities of care in which productivist goals rooted in socialist self-provisioning practices and embodied in orderly landscapes encounter new trends of agricultural care manifested in the natural aesthetics of the farms. We examine dynamic tensions between the two farming modalities by linking them to different understandings of moral commitments and responsibilities for plants and land. Through the lens of temporality, we also show how these divergent care modes are themselves grounded in gender inequalities reproduced on the farms and enabled by by the welfare state institutions, including maternity leave and retirement policies.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-7347469
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2020
publisher Elsevier Ltd.
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-73474692020-07-10 Diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: Negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in Lithuania Mincytė, Diana Bartkienė, Aistė Bikauskaitė, Renata Geoforum Article While scholars have developed a nuanced understanding of agriculture as a form of care, the temporal organization of farming practices has received little consideration. Focusing on how farmers organize and experience agriculture, we track diverging approaches to care work on urban farms in Vilnius, Lithuania. Our ethnographic fieldwork and interviews show how Lithuanian urban farmers are struggling to reconcile the civic ideals of the global urban farming movement with their historical understandings of care for specific plants and the land. Whereas the older generation views farming as kinship-based individualized work focusing on particular plants and garden ecologies, the younger generation approaches it as a way to unwind, mediate, and build a community. These different perspectives on farming translate into divergent temporalities of care in which productivist goals rooted in socialist self-provisioning practices and embodied in orderly landscapes encounter new trends of agricultural care manifested in the natural aesthetics of the farms. We examine dynamic tensions between the two farming modalities by linking them to different understandings of moral commitments and responsibilities for plants and land. Through the lens of temporality, we also show how these divergent care modes are themselves grounded in gender inequalities reproduced on the farms and enabled by by the welfare state institutions, including maternity leave and retirement policies. Elsevier Ltd. 2020-10 2020-07-10 /pmc/articles/PMC7347469/ /pubmed/32834078 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.06.006 Text en © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Mincytė, Diana
Bartkienė, Aistė
Bikauskaitė, Renata
Diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: Negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in Lithuania
title Diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: Negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in Lithuania
title_full Diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: Negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in Lithuania
title_fullStr Diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: Negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in Lithuania
title_full_unstemmed Diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: Negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in Lithuania
title_short Diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: Negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in Lithuania
title_sort diverging temporalities of care work on urban farms: negotiating history, responsibility, and productivity in lithuania
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7347469/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32834078
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.06.006
work_keys_str_mv AT mincytediana divergingtemporalitiesofcareworkonurbanfarmsnegotiatinghistoryresponsibilityandproductivityinlithuania
AT bartkieneaiste divergingtemporalitiesofcareworkonurbanfarmsnegotiatinghistoryresponsibilityandproductivityinlithuania
AT bikauskaiterenata divergingtemporalitiesofcareworkonurbanfarmsnegotiatinghistoryresponsibilityandproductivityinlithuania