"the Knowledge of our Field"

 ABOUT 

About the Project

"The Knowledge of our Field" is a project which takes as it's focus "the lawn".

"The lawn," here, is understood as a largely-monocultural ecosystem of turfgrasses, created in many places across the world, which many social meanings are collected. This project seeks to simultanoursly heighten and display the functions of the lawn.

This project takes "the lawn" as a site of critical inquiry. What societal anxieties convene in lawns? What are the ecological demands of lawn? What biological and social ecosystems are lawns a part of? How do lawns exist simultaneously as private and public spaces, and how does this space suggest questions about privacy and consent?


Lawn Kiosk

Central to this project is the "lawn kiosk". This portable structure serves as a public pavilion, to be deployed in parks.


Bibliography

This is list of the various texts which are most actively referenced in this project.
Please reach out if you'd like help finding any of the titles.


Animal Acts: Perfroming Species Today, edited by Una Chaudhuri & Holly Hughes. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014.

Beard, James B. Trufgrass: Science and Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972.

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Drouin, Jean-Marc. A Philosophy of the Insect. Translated by Anne Trager. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Hamera, Judith. Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850-1970. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Jenkins, Virginia Scott. The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession. Washington D.C., USA: Smithsonian Books, 1994.

Lowen, Sara. "The Tyranny of the Lawn." American Heritage, September 1991.

Parkinson, James. Democracy adn Public Space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Robbins, Paul. Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007.

Schindler, Sarah B. "Banning Lawns." George Washington Law Review 82 (2014): 394-455.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Wampole, Christy. Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016