Call for proposals: Public

Announced on the Land Arts Listserv this past week:

UBLIC: Gardens (new timeline) Call for Proposals Spring 2010

PUBLIC: Gardens will explore the ways gardens are understood and appreciated – as gardens, but also in terms of how they participate in events beyond their borders. We find gardens not only in beautified public spaces, but in backyards, on balconies, down alleyways, in glossy magazines, on tv, and in cyberspace. Gardens are cultural forms that express dreams of paradise, power and privilege, changes in human relationships with nature, and more. They also serve practical, economic and social-psychological purposes: gardens feed people, engage the senses, and provide sites of pleasure, recreation and leisure. Yet, wherever a garden is, other things are not. Gardens stake a (growing) claim on space, consume resources, require our attention, and set limits on plant growth and non-human activities. Never innocent, full of possibility, gardens provide a rich terrain for investigation.

This issue of Public is interested in (real and imagined) explorations of gardens by artists, activists, writers, theorists, historians, scholars, landscape architects, designers, and gardeners
interested in the myriad significance of public and private gardens, including the politics of their location and modes of operation in various contexts.

Topics and themes of interest include (but are not limited by):
- garden as art (e.g. artist gardens, horticultural intervention art)
- garden as idea (gardens in writing, on screen and in our imaginations)
- garden politics and gardening as a political practice
- guerilla gardening
- utopian gardens
- permaculture, the city as garden, and the garden city
- cultivated wilderness, forest gardens, pollinator gardens
- community gardens (allotments, sustenance and victory gardens, communal gardens etc.)
- edible gardens
- flowers, weeds and seeds
- seed vaults and other preservation projects
- living roofs and plant walls
- outerspace gardening; underwater gardening
- garden web cams and virtual gardening (e.g. Second Life)
- public and private gardens
- history and theories of gardens

Interested contributors are strongly invited to contact the editors to discuss their proposed projects and papers. Proposals and abstracts will be reviewed (for conditional acceptance) up until July 3 2009. The deadline for submission of complete papers and projects is August 15 2009.

This issue will be co-edited by Erin Despard and Monika Kin Gagnon. Please email us at edespard@alcor.concordia.ca and mkgagnon@gmail.com. For more information on the journal, Public: http://www.publicjournal.ca