Bisson, Chris. (2010). Cultivating a Social Ecology: Voices From Community Gardens On Social Nature and Environmental Justice. B.A Hon. Thesis – Carleton University.

Community Gardens are spaces where certain ideas of society and nature come together in ways that challenge conventional narratives of one another. Social ecology, a school of thought focused on blurring the lines between the nature and people in terms of justice and oppression, has primarily focused on materialist political economies of cities (Carson, 1986). Recently the investigation of ontology have been introduced to the field through poststructuralist theory, and community gardens provide a clear case
where the social constructs of discourse are important to understanding the naturesocietal dialectics of social ecology (Clark, 1997). Through a discourse analysis of accounts given by community gardeners on their experiences gardening in Ottawa this thesis shows that spaces such as community gardens, which are ultimately very limited in their ability to radically alter the political economies of food production in cities, stand as important spaces where more radical discourses on social ecology may occur. These discourses are fundamentally important in building such movements as they act
as spaces for marginalized peoples to ontologically challenge their marginalization. As written by bell hooks (2009), wilderness can become a place to challenge and resist oppression. In the case of this thesis, community gardens provide an example of ways in which other kinds of nature can produce similar effects.