Privilege in a place ballet: an incomplete argument of places and bodies

Abstract

Like many neighborhoods in cities across the United States, Gifford Park—a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska—has been recreating itself through urban agriculture. Past research about urban agriculture reveals that it can operate as a material argument that resists negative characterizations and empowers residents, but this argument is incomplete. This case study extends the idea that places can function as spatial arguments and conceptualizes urban agriculture as a place ballet. Place ballets, which describe the interactions between places and bodies, offer a way of thinking about large-scale, slow-moving rhetorical action as well as demonstrating how economic and racial privilege manifest in the place and bodies—the material foundations of a place ballet. I argue that urban agriculture functions as a place ballet that reveals a complex, material argument about the positive impacts places and bodies can have on communities and community members while simultaneously overlooking the economic and racial privileges inherent in these efforts. Although the concept of a place ballet is a useful way to bring together two aspects of material rhetoric—place and bodies—it carries its own implications of economic and racial privilege.

Keywords:

• Place ballet
• urban agricultural
• spatial argument
• privilege
• rhetoric

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Creighton’s Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship (CURAS) for their financial support and the participants who took the time to sit for interviews. Additionally, she expresses gratitude to Beth Innocenti and the anonymous reviewers for their help in strengthening this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I use the term “urban agriculture” to include both “urban farming” and “community gardening.” Big Muddy is firmly in the category of urban farming and the Refugee Empowerment Center only has community gardens. The distinction is an important one to these organizations. But for the purposes of this paper, one umbrella term will suffice.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samantha Senda-Cook

Samantha Senda-Cook (PhD, University of Utah) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and an affiliated faculty member with the Environmental Science and Sustainability programs at Creighton University. She studies rhetorical theory and analyzes environmental communication and materiality in the contexts of social movements, outdoor recreation, and urban spaces/places. She was recently awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Japan in 2019. Her work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Environmental Communication, and the Western Journal of Communication. When she's not researching or teaching, she's probably reading a mystery novel, cooking, or riding the hills of Omaha on her bike.