The Central Experimental Farm as a "Truth-Spot."

Detail from "Soils of the Central Experimental Farm" showing the original 465 acres.

Author's note: this post is a bit of an experiment. In it I use the Central Experimental Farm to explore Thomas Gieryn's concept of "truth-spots." It is written in a particular moment when the Farm is still facing threats to its research fields, and those politics of course carry through. In a sense this post is inspired by the great community of active historians and my desire to draw out the concepts embedded within my other public writings on the subject. Some of the links may lead to articles behind (steep) paywalls.

In the conclusion to his exploration of the interwar Chicago School of Urban Studies, Thomas Gieryn posits that "in the emplacement of its practices...science is probably not the exception, but the rule."

Gieryn's current research project focuses on what he calls "truth-spots." Simply put, truth-spots are locations where knowledge about the world is created and, importantly, legitimized. When applied to science this presents a curious "paradox of place and truth" (emphasis in original).*

Science, like all human endeavors, is a cultural process. People do it in places. It involves learned practices and discourses. But objectivity is (often) a central legitimizing discourse in science. The literary abstraction of science from where it is practiced is part of the epistemic scaffolding used to reinforce its status as universal knowledge. As Gieryn notes, "scientific claims are diminished in their credibility as they are situated somewhere, as if their truthfulness depended upon conditions located only there."

At the same time some subjective contexts of science can provide studies performed or published in their gambit with powerful legitimacy. There's prestigious universities (the Ivy League and Oxbridge); journals (Nature or Science); institutions (CERN and NASA); and field stations (Rothamsted Research and Kew Gardens).

Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm is another such institution.

ORDC Seminar - The Early History of the Central Experimental Farm, 1886-1938.

This morning I gave a talk on the early history of the Central Experimental Farm as part of the Ottawa Research and Development Centre's seminar series. You can listen to it here:

Domains of Literature - Introduction and Context

Every university, every department, has its own practices regarding comprehensive and qualifying examinations. Usually these include "fields" or "domains" of literature which are either standardized across the department or completely open. In my department the individual PhD committee has great leeway in deciding what goes into the domains and my committee challenged me to come up with a base list, which they then commented on and added to.

This is harder than it seems. Sure in being given latitude to decide I had the chance to stack the list, so to speak, with works I was already familiar with. But, as my supervisor said, I should pay attention to my committee and the journals they publish in, who they cite in their work and teach in their courses, who they would put on the list if they were creating it.

Beyond the literature I already knew, my committee's publications, and the every increasing fractal search cross referencing common citations brings, I found online syllabi and lists of departments and other individuals who've completed their exams extremely useful. In that spirit, I have reproduced my lists here for those who may be going down the same rabbit hole as me.

Domains of Literature - Public History and the Geography of Storytelling

 This is part of a series of posts related to the domains of literature I covered in my qualifying exam. I am sharing it in hopes that it helps other students creating their lists. Please see the introductory post in the series for more details.

The final domain, public history and the geography of storytelling, looks at both methodological questions in historical geography research and modes of presenting that research. Public historians are a diverse community of practitioners fundamentally interested in the ways historical knowledge is created and presented to broad and multifaceted publics in various locations such as archives and museums. Geographers of storytelling are concerned with the spatial dimensions of stories, how they’re told and how landscapes become inscribed with meaning and discourses. This domain finds natural linkages between these sub-fields, particularly in the recent work of a group of British geographers under the auspices of ‘anticipatory history’ (see: DeSilvey 2012 and DeSilvey, Naylor and Sackett 2011). As such it provides the basis for exploring the contingent nature of the documents, landscapes and material cultures that form the core of the proposed research as well as addressing concerns regarding the narrative form of this thesis project.  

This post has two main parts:
(1) The domain itself; and,
(2) A syllabus created as a thought experience while studying the list.

A Walk in the Farm - 60 Acres at Arpents 2014

This post is a modified version of my prepared talk at Arpents 2014. In my actual talk, I wandered widely from the prepared text so this account doesn't accurately represent that version. Such is a Pete Anderson presentation.

Looking north-east towards downtown from near the intersection Baseline and Merivale.

A couple of things happened since I agreed to give this presentation that changed the contours of what I originally planned to speak about. First in preparing for my qualifying exams, my research focus narrowed on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries limiting the methodological thrust of this presentation which was originally to be focused on the use of walking oral history interviews. Second, John Baird, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the minister responsible for the National Capital Commission, recently made a direct attack on the geographic integrity of my research site, Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm.

Rather than looking at walking methodologies in historical geography research, then, I first outline the recent announcement by Baird and reactions to them--if you follow me on twitter this will be familiar to you. In the second section I argue that the pace of observation is an important factor in the ways different gazes are directed at the Farm.

Crosspost: Vacating Science and Forgetting History at the Central Experimental Farm

This post originally appeared at Active History. As always, please leave comments at the original.

Pete Anderson posing near the threatened experimental plots with the Civic Hospital in the background. Photo credit: Laura Cameron.

On November 3^rd, John Baird announced that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada transferred approximately 24 hectares (60 acres) of the Central Experimental Farm, in Ottawa, to the National Capital Commission. The NCC in turn offered to lease the land to the Ottawa Hospital to build a new Civic Campus. The Hospital then mused about the using this new land as a parking lot.

Hulme: Human Geography and the Many Voices of Climate Change

On Thursday, November 13^th and Friday, November 14^th Mike Hulme gave two public lectures at Carleton University. Hulme is a Professor of Climate and Culture in the Department of Geography at University of King’s College and after a career working as a climatologist at the University of East Anglia is now making a transition to being a human (and in particular a cultural) geographer.

/Kitchen Literacy/ in "The Westward-Moving House": A Joint Review

 

• Ann Vileisis, Kitchen Literacy: How we lost knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back. (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008.) Book Website. 
•  John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Westward-Moving House: Three American Houses and the People Who Lived in Them.” Places Journal, July 2011: Online. [Originally printed in Landscapes (2.3), Spring 1953.]

Food is essential to life. These two works, Ann Vileisis’s Kitchen Literacy and John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s “The Westward-Moving House,” focus on the social histories and cultural geographies of people and places at seemingly opposite poles of eating: the cooks and the farmers. This observation obscures the deep similarities in the important stories Vileisis and Jackson tell about how we have come to rely on distributed supply chains for our daily sustenance.