Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a placed-based portrait of affective experiences through time within the context of the Anthropocene. This research, conducted with volunteer gardeners at an urban farm in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, focuses on their temporal journeys and reorientations in ways of dwelling.

Paper long abstract:

What role do our feelings play in dictating our motivations and aspirations during the climate crisis? Can these feelings move us to envision the future in more hopeful ways? As the existential threat of the climate crisis looms large, these questions must be asked and answered. This paper aims to do exactly that by focusing on volunteers working with an environmental social enterprise called CERES at an urban farm in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. Using the stories of seven volunteers, I look at what motivated these people to become involved with the organisation, what keeps them incentivised to stay, what they would like to see happen in the future, and what they envisage doing to bring such future about.

Drawing on a blend of participant observation and interviews, I obtained data through fieldwork and one-on-one conversations. My findings indicate that past feelings of dissatisfaction with experiences of acceleration and disconnection in their ways of dwelling acted as the catalyst to bring participants to volunteering. Volunteers experience their work at the farm as being grounded in producing various forms of connectivity — from enchantment with the place they are in, to embodied relations between people and plants. This deepening emplacement has created opportunities for volunteers to imagine the future in hopeful ways. My interest is in demonstrating how these shifts in actions are entangled with a myriad of affective experiences through time, and how a such affective experiences can lead individuals to conceive of hopeful, environmentally sustainable futures.