I have been involved with my field site, the Bloomington Community Orchard, for years, but this is the first summer where attendance at work & learn days, when their volunteers gather to do site maintenance, has been my top priority. This week, when temperatures hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit with oppressive humidity, I struggled to claw my way back out of the house & over to the Orchard. Within minutes, my body was tired. I was flailing & fading. My back ached, & the fabric of my shirt clung to it, heavy with sweat & humidity.
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During classes this week, I had my students read Hayden & Buck's "Doing community supported agriculture: Tactile space, affect and effects of membership". It was their introduction to non-representational theory. We used the opportunity to discuss how all five senses build the landscape & enhance our relationship to place. As Haden & Buck write, following Deleuze & Guattari, "...affect is transversal force that is always being created, becoming. Affect emerges from spatially constrained mutable webs of associations and actions." Merriam-Webster defines affect as "the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion considered apart from bodily changes" and "a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion." It was these two things I kept in mind while watching bodies move through the orchard, sipping cider & bending into downward-facing dog.
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The Bloomington Community Orchard had their second annual Harvest Festival on July 26. I was on hand to help with a haiku contest and to do some participant observation while learning about beekeeping and fruit harvesting. I took some photos that I thought I'd share.
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