Bio
Marina Sage Carlstroem is a Senior at NYU Gallatin. Her concentration centers around the intersection of Politics, Performance and the Built Environment. She is fascinated by the inherently political dimension of creative arts – particularly theater and film- and how they have been used trans-historically as tools of democracy. At the same time she aims to analyze how the theatricality of politics both aids and stymies true material reform; and how the built environment we create shapes the performative and political dimensions of daily life. Marina spent the Spring 2022 semester in Berlin focusing on the dialectic of political change and cultural production in the 20th century in Berlin, with a particular interest in alternative forms of sociopolitical expression like squatting and the post-reunification DIY movement. Outside of the classroom, Marina has engaged with the questions at the core of her concentration in myriad ways. She currently serves as Co-President of the Urban Democracy Lab Student Organizers, an editor of Gallatin’s arts and culture magazine Embodied and has recently directed new plays at Gallatin, Tisch and Berkeley Reparatory Theater. Marina is excited to partner with Brooklyn Queens Land Trust as a Gallatin Global Fellow in Urban Practice; exploring the impact of public green space on community empowerment and situated-ness, and to carry these insights into her postgraduate work.
Mission Statement
David Harvey writes in The Right To The City that “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”. A city like New York can be extremely isolating, and while people live close to each other, sometimes the lack of space actually creates an even greater barrier between neighbors, as they try to squeeze out any sense of personal space psychologically they can. Additionally, people live fractured lives and often do not work in the neighborhoods they live in, let alone even know their neighbors as rent increases year to year change neighborhoods drastically. There is often a focus on how one is shaped by the city as an individual, but the communal network is not seen as a cohesive unit in the way that Harvey describes it- mutually affecting and being affected by the environment. I hope that my research this summer will allow me to coalesce the urban community into more than the sum of individual actions, but rather see how the network of urban citizens can be supported and challenged by each other to form a more authentic and engaged urban democracy.
This summer my research questions converge around this nexus of community space. While working for BQLT, I will be writing Land Management plans for the organization as well as creating promotional materials that highlight the uses of the garden. Through this work, I want to understand what the gardens mean to the people who use them, who those people are and aren’t and how to make them more accessible to community members who don’t already access the space. For my own research project aside from the work I will do for BQLT, my question narrows in on the relationship between greenspace and community cohesion. I want to know how a space that is primarily autonomous (ie. run without state intervention, run by community members for community members) and open to all members of the community affects residents’ sense of situatedness in their community, both physically within space, and pertaining to their connections to other community members. I want to see how the gardens serve different communities differently, how members have tailored them to be hyper-local- and if this has made them ripe for further community organizing outside of the garden locale.
In regards to my positionality within this research project, I want to be aware of the fact that the gardeners and garden users -the people I will be asking the most of- will be receiving the least from me in exchange. Most of the work I am planning to do currently is to support the administrative side of the BQLT, and not particularly focused on developing relationships with the individual gardens I will be collecting my research materials from. I want to mitigate this by engaging more closely with the communities within specific gardens. I need to spend time engaging as more than a researcher with these groups by attending garden days and helping out in the actual gardens that I am interviewing gardeners and garden users at. I think that this will not only build a trust between me and the community members that I am going to interview, but also going to help me better understand the communities that I am researching as more than an outside observer. At the same time, I need to remember that I am not in fact a part of these communities and not feel frustrated that my position as an outsider means that I can only develop a specific understanding of dynamics within the community in a short time, compared to embedding in a specific community for a longer swath. In addition to this, since each of the gardens is situated within a different community, I need to be careful not to generalize the research I do too much and instead give credence to the specific contexts of different gardens in a clear way. While my project does take a broader overview of the gardens and their specific communities , I need to structure my project by collecting evidence from individual communities before I try to map my hypotheses onto them, and can move onto larger conclusions. I also am aware not only of my own positionality as a member of BQLT, but of the positionality of BQLT as an organization coming into communities. Gardeners may not have close personal relationships with the board members, as the BQLT is a parent organization, and I have to be conscious that I am both representing myself and NYU, but also BQLT to community members. I need to be prepared to offer information about the organization and serve as a bridge between the community and the organization and be responsible for that, as well as my own research. Most of the administrators for BQLT do not work directly in the gardens and are doing a different kind of labor than gardeners do even though they all are a part of the same fabric. I will try my best to be the bridge between this engaged research/hands in earth labor and the archival, legal work that is happening at BQLT administration.
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