Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Social Work (MSW)

Department

Social Work

Program Name/Specialization

Studies in Social Work Practice

Faculty/School

Lyle S. Hallman Faculty of Social Work

First Advisor

Timothy Leduc

Advisor Role

Advisor

Second Advisor

Anh Ngo

Advisor Role

Committee Member

Third Advisor

Chizuru Nobe-Ghelani

Advisor Role

Committee Member

Abstract

This study explores how arts-integrated gardening affects experiences of ecological grief through autoethnography and draws on my personal experiences as a survivor of environmentally linked cancer and artist working with gardens through social practice. My research builds on two areas of emergent scholarship—investigations of ecological grief and gardens as sites for social work practice—to explore how social work may address ecological grief through arts-integrated gardening. I use a quilting autoethnography as a method of inquiry to foreground my subjective knowledge and analyze it through intersectional feminist, disability and decolonizing theories. By incorporating narrative analysis and arts-based inquiry—writing in place, poetic and visual inquiry, and creative gardening acts—my research engages relationally with more-than-human ecologies as way to build connection and solidarity with degraded lands.

Building on research about the social, political and mental health benefits of gardening, my research shows that gardens can be generative sites for moving through ecological grief. It shows how the integration of artistic, somatic, collective and decolonial approaches to gardening can help cultivate an active politic of solidarity around ecological wounds. My story with cancer points to how connecting personal experiences of environmental harm with wider ecological grief can disrupt silence around ecological grief and build kinship with the more-than-human world. My experience shows how gardening as an artistic somatic practice can help to build capacity to move through complex feelings and responses to ecological grief; including shame, complicity, dissociation and fetishization; transform colonial attachments; and mend intergenerational trauma and disconnection from land relations. I explore how gardens can be generative spaces for developing social work practices that integrate healing ecological grief with politicized action and suggest directions and interventions for social work to develop as part of its responsibilities to land relations and escalating environmental crisis and degradation.

Convocation Year

2025

Convocation Season

Spring

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