This dissertation explores the everyday practice of home and community vegetable gardening in a small southern Illinois city. The project engages with questions of how diverse elements of practice interact over time in the development of both gardens and gardeners, dwelling particularly on how the material agency of nonhumans contributes to what emerges. Combining a broad investigation of societal influences and constraints involved in gardening practices with a granular focus on material interactions in the garden, I consider the kinds of relationships individuals forge with the nonhuman environment in a modern, Western context and how they do so. Understanding such connections is essential in formulating responses to contemporary environmental crises. The study addresses multiple topics of interest in anthropology including skill and learning, sensory experience, time, care practices, ecological embeddedness, and community building in social movements.

This Bachelor thesis is about international students, who travelled to Uppsala to study abroad during the autumn exchange term, which took place between September 2021 to January 2022. Four students from different countries were interviewed about their cultural and social experiences when the students studied abroad and how they oriented themselves in a foreign environment. This thesis focuses on sensory anthropology, which is a subfield. The sensorial aspects are about the international student's experiences and the primary ones are light and darkness, space, flavors, and memories. When it comes to local belonging and imagined communities, the sensory aspects are about the value of individual experiences as well as the collective aspect of establishing a new community. In the period where international students learned, they clarified whether they felt a local belonging to Uppsala.  When it comes to whether the students feel a sense of local belonging in Uppsala, the student's own educational experiences, local belonging, and communities in their home countries are compared to the Swedish students' existing communities at Uppsala. Foreign students also describe their native languages and their encounters with the Swedish language, and how the contrast resulted in feelings of exclusion from the Swedish society.

For people who live with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome illness is a hidden construct. The body does not display the chronicity of the internal experience. This thesis removes the barrier between what is experienced and what is visible by creating visual means of communicating the body’s hidden experience. The place of the viewer is part of this discussion. Through visual methods digital photographic techniques and the current interest in sensory anthropology the embodied sensory chronic illness experience is explored. The hidden experiences were made visual creating “MeBoxes” and masks which showed both the external and embodied internal experiences of chronic illness. As the process of working with and walking beside the participants developed, I found that the discourse on imaging within the literature was inadequate to show the real lived experiences of those with chronic illness. My interactions with the people of this thesis and the process of honouring their experiences required a model that would encourage the viewer to new and perhaps unrealised depths of participation to understand the participant’s multi-faceted and multi-layered experiences. Part of the discussion is the ability of images to communicate sensory experience as is the case with Munch’s The Scream and Picasso’s Guernica. Through the use of a hypertextual self-scape I show how participants created access to their experiences through their visual representations and through a collaborative approach became composite hypertextual self-scape metaphors.

For people who live with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome illness is a hidden construct. The body does not display the chronicity of the internal experience. This thesis removes the barrier between what is experienced and what is visible by creating visual means of communicating the body’s hidden experience. The place of the viewer is part of this discussion. Through visual methods digital photographic techniques and the current interest in sensory anthropology the embodied sensory chronic illness experience is explored. The hidden experiences were made visual creating “MeBoxes” and masks which showed both the external and embodied internal experiences of chronic illness. As the process of working with and walking beside the participants developed, I found that the discourse on imaging within the literature was inadequate to show the real lived experiences of those with chronic illness. My interactions with the people of this thesis and the process of honouring their experiences required a model that would encourage the viewer to new and perhaps unrealised depths of participation to understand the participant’s multi-faceted and multi-layered experiences. Part of the discussion is the ability of images to communicate sensory experience as is the case with Munch’s The Scream and Picasso’s Guernica. Through the use of a hypertextual self-scape I show how participants created access to their experiences through their visual representations and through a collaborative approach became composite hypertextual self-scape metaphors.

For people who live with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity syndrome illness is a hidden construct. The body does not display the chronicity of the internal experience. This thesis removes the barrier between what is experienced and what is visible by creating visual means of communicating the body’s hidden experience. The place of the viewer is part of this discussion. Through visual methods digital photographic techniques and the current interest in sensory anthropology the embodied sensory chronic illness experience is explored. The hidden experiences were made visual creating “MeBoxes” and masks which showed both the external and embodied internal experiences of chronic illness. As the process of working with and walking beside the participants developed, I found that the discourse on imaging within the literature was inadequate to show the real lived experiences of those with chronic illness. My interactions with the people of this thesis and the process of honouring their experiences required a model that would encourage the viewer to new and perhaps unrealised depths of participation to understand the participant’s multi-faceted and multi-layered experiences. Part of the discussion is the ability of images to communicate sensory experience as is the case with Munch’s The Scream and Picasso’s Guernica. Through the use of a hypertextual self-scape I show how participants created access to their experiences through their visual representations and through a collaborative approach became composite hypertextual self-scape metaphors.

Dans une première partie, une approche sociohistorique permet de dénaturaliser les catégories d'arts martiaux et de sports de combat forgées par des acteurs sociaux en lutte pour le contrôle d’un champ. Cette première étape permet d'identifier trois idéaux types : les combats codifiés, les combats culturalisés et les pratiques de self-defense. La deuxième partie démontre à partir des données de terrains recueillies que le Tai-chi peut être analysé comme une technique de soi et l’école de Tai-chi comme un dispositif visant à l’incorporation d’un éthos confucéen par les élèves. La troisième partie montre la subjectivation des élèves repose sur l’incorporation d’une culture kinesthésique. Cependant, les élèves transforment le dispositif d’éthopoïèse confucéen du maître en un dispositif d’exopoïèse. Le « Ren », forme idéalisée du lien social confucéen, devient une forme de non-lien social permettant d’enraciner l’école dans un imaginaire exotique. L’école devient ainsi un espace d'altérité radicale permettant un déplacement récréatif, une sublimation du quotidien. Cet espace devient ainsi un lieu privilégié de réinvention de soi. / In the first part of thesis, a socio-historical analysis allows an unnaturalision of the concept of martial arts and combat sport created by social actors in their struggle for controlling a field. This first step enables us to identify three ideal types : the codified combat, culturalised combat and self-defence practice. The second part shows from the field data that Tai-chi could be analysed as a technology of the self and the Tai-chi school as an apparatus aiming at the embodiment of a Confucian ethos by the students. The third part points out that the student subjectivation lies on the embodiment of a kinaesthetic culture. However, the student transforms the Confucianist éthopoïesis apparatus into an exopoïesis apparatus. The « Ren », an idealised form of Confucianist social relations became a form of non-social relations rooting the school in an exotic imaginary. The school thus became a space of radical alterity enabling a recreative shift, a sublimation of everyday life. Thus, the school became a favoured place of self-reinvention.

This thesis is an anthropological exploration of the first legal Canadian Grow Cup (3 years after legalization (October 17, 2018)). It takes a sensory anthropology approach to 'knowing' from practical activity. This approach acknowledges that senses/sensing do not belong to one category, instead, "our sensory perception is inextricable from the cultural categories that we use to give meaning to sensory experiences in social and material interactions" (Pink 2015, 7). Taking this approach aims to address the current legal framework that reduces cannabis to its molecular compounds. The methodological approach is centred around an apprenticeship with an experienced home grower, whom I met online and who agreed to guide me throughout my participation in the grow cup. The organization of the thesis follows my movements through the apprenticeship situated both online and in my mentor's garden in West Ottawa, Ontario. Having to abide by winning criteria based on THC and Terpene metrics, this thesis offers arguments and critique of the current conjoint legal/ public health/ industry framework. The latter framework is in line with mainstream pharmacology, which advocates the need to use purified substances as they are considered more specific and safe. However, I critique this approach of 'knowing' cannabis through the cannabis cup as the "effects" and quality of whole derived cannabis products are quantified and standardized based on a percentage number associated with two out of 100+ molecular compounds. This creates a new phenomenon, shaping cultivation practices focused on single molecule percentage numbers. Therefore, I ask how does a skilled home grower know/sense cannabis, and how does the contest criteria constrain (or not) the home grower's ways of knowing/ sensing cannabis? Answering these questions aims to understand the sensorial ways of knowing cannabis. As such, this thesis does not deal with standardization or metrics directly. Instead, attention is oriented towards what escapes the contest-winning criteria and standardization, my curiosity resting in ways of 'knowing' directly from what is evoked through practical activity.