kirsten valentine cadieux: research and academic projects

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Research and academic projects

Northeastern Productive Landscapes (2007 prospectus)

I study the cultural geography of land use change and the politics of planning processes at the urban-rural interface, particularly concentrating on intersections of urbanization, nature conservation, and agriculture activism. My work is mainly ethnographic and historical and focuses on the relationships between land use and landscape ideologies as they can be understood through everyday material and representational practices. My interests include alternative agri-food movements, the concepts of place, landscape, and nature, and epistemological issues involved in the interplay between political ecology and other disciplinary studies of nature-society relations.

I have taught courses on urban geography and agriculture and the environment, was recently a fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale, and am currently working in the University of Minnesota Department of Geography. I received my A.B. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and Radcliffe, and my M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto, specializing in cultural landscape geography and focusing on metropolitan edge and exurban landscapes in the Greater Golden Horseshoe of southern Ontario and in the Canterbury region of Aotearoa New Zealand.

My current research considers the function of concepts of performance, agency, and implicit or explicit symbolism in behaviors directed toward goals of sustainability. I am particularly interested in ways that political economy is represented (or not represented) in everyday life, and I am thinking about parallels between these representations in exurban land use and alternative agriculture.

Areas of Research

1. The greening of urban dispersion: metropolitan edge change; exurbanization and greenspace planning and negotiation; sustainable consumption and production
2. Conspicuous production: urban and peri-urban agriculture and forestry; modern subsistence and community farming; everyday political economy and critical neo-agrarianism
3. Modern pastoral: social practices that construct and produce cultural landscapes focused on combinations of nature and production

Research

My research focuses on the production of everyday environments at sites where processes of urbanization and food systems come together in everyday experience. My current work examines social movements that advocate relocalizing productive land use practices, such as urban farming and agro-forestry. How do these movements interact with the ideology and form of residential landscapes as settlements become more suburban and exurban, and as social disparities increase? I concentrate on the narratives and land use practices of participants in local production movements in different spatial and social contexts across the rural-urban continuum: in central cities, in their suburbs, and in the exurban areas and sites of amenity migration spreading out from urban centers, where small- to mid-scale food relocalization efforts are concentrated and mixed with residential land uses.

In case studies in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, the Canterbury region around Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Southern New England in the United States, I have studied land use planning histories and used ethnographic and cultural landscape analysis methods to explore the experience of and aspirations associated with the landscapes pejoratively identified in urban planning and nature conservation discourses as sprawl. Examining the ways in which residents and environmental managers of these cities and their peripheries have represented, practiced, and reproduced sprawl narratives, I concentrate on tensions in the everyday productive environments of sprawl.

For a description of my current research project on the relationship between agriculture activists and land use managers, please click here.