Can boundary objects be used for collaboration across timescales? Hope for university food-growing projects

Abstract

Against the background of an expanding urban agriculture movement, new food growing initiatives have been emerging in universities. Student-led food gardens in universities are exemplars of organisations with a transient volunteer population, an issue that is increasingly faced in the volunteering sector, including in urban agriculture. A transient volunteer base can cause issues with maintaining sufficient levels of participation, building community knowledge retention and transfer, establishing continuity, and efficiency. In an effort to understand how these impacts of transience can be managed, this paper explores if and how the concept of 'boundary objects' can be used to support initiatives with transient organisers and participants, as in university food growing projects. The ideas presented emerged from a 2.5 year action research project with three student-led food-growing initiatives at English universities. The physical garden space, a common 'vision,' records of achievement, and putting the garden on a campus map were found to be operating as boundary objects between 'waves' of participants to cope with challenges associated with the transience. The application and understanding of 'boundary objects' across timescales presents unique theoretical and practical challenges, such as how collaboration and communication can take place, as well as how and if consensus can be achieved given limited overlap between 'waves' of participants. These 'cross-temporal boundary objects' have the potential to contribute to the internal resilience of university food growing projects and other grassroots initiatives with transient participants, enabling them to be more fruitful seeds for larger-scale sustainable transformations.

Full text

Can boundary objects be used for collaboration across timescales? Hope
for university food-growing projects
Os ‘boundary objects’ podem ser usados para colaboração em escalas de
tempo? Esperança para projetos universitários de cultivo de alimentos
Rebecca Laycock Pedersen1
1 Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Keele University, UK, rebecca.laycock@bth.se
Abstract.
Against the background of an expanding urban agriculture movement, new food growing initiatives have been
emerging in universities. Student-led food gardens in universities are exemplars of organisations with a transient
volunteer population, an issue that is increasingly faced in the volunteering sector, including in urban agriculture.
A transient volunteer base can cause issues with maintaining sufficient levels of participation, building community
knowledge retention and transfer, establishing continuity, and efficiency. In an effort to understand how these
impacts of transience can be managed, this paper explores if and how the concept of ‘boundary objects’ can be
used to support initiatives with transient organisers and participants, as in university food growing projects. The
ideas presented emerged from a 2.5 year action research project with three student-led food-growing initiatives at
English universities. The physical garden space, a common 'vision,' records of achievement, and putting the garden
on a campus map were found to be operating as boundary objects between 'waves' of participants to cope with
challenges associated with the transience. The application and understanding of 'boundary objects' across
timescales presents unique theoretical and practical challenges, such as how collaboration and communication can
take place, as well as how and if consensus can be achieved given limited overlap between 'waves' of participants.
These 'cross-temporal boundary objects' have the potential to contribute to the internal resilience of university food
growing projects and other grassroots initiatives with transient participants, enabling them to be more fruitful seeds
for larger-scale sustainable transformations.
Keywords: community gardens, urban agriculture, higher education, transience, action research
Introduction
Against the background of an expanding urban agriculture movement, new food
growing initiatives have been emerging in universities (Laycock Pedersen & Robinson, 2018).
These initiatives have the capacity to support educational outcomes (Hoffman et al., 2007), as
well as a range of other benefits, like developing a sense of place (Shan & Walter, 2015) and
increased interdisciplinary interaction (Apul & Philpott, 2011). There is a long history of using
university campuses for agricultural training and research, especially in the context of land-
grant institutions in the United States (McDowell, 2003). However, the trend of student-led
food growing on university campuses with specific sustainability ambitions, such as
environmental education and growing food in an environmentally-friendly way, is relatively
new.
Student-led food gardens in universities exemplify issues associated with having
transient volunteer populations, an issue that is increasingly faced in the volunteering sector
(MacDuff, 2005), including in urban agriculture initiatives. Student-led food gardens exemplify

the issues associated with transience because students’ stays at university are usually time-
limited, and even within these years their engagement can be irregular due to holidays and
uneven workloads. A transient volunteer base can cause issues with maintaining sufficient
levels of participation, building community knowledge retention and transfer, establishing
continuity, and efficiency (Bakker et al., 2010; Adusei-Asante, 2015; Brookes et al., 2017).
In an effort to understand how these impacts of transience can be managed, this paper
explores if and how boundary objects can be used to support initiatives with both transient
organisers and participants, as in university food growing projects. 'Boundary objects' are
abstract or physical things (like common language, documents/maps/diagrams, and
methods/routines) that are plastic enough to be interpreted differently, but robust enough to
retain a common identity to enable groups of people from different 'social worlds' to create
coherent understandings for collaboration on a common task. Boundary objects are usually used
with groups that are operating over a common time period, but they have not been used between
stakeholders that are temporally asynchronous, which is what this paper will explore.
Methodology
The findings presented in this paper come from a 2.5 year action research project with
three student-led food gardens at English universities. The overall ambition of the study was
to understand the impacts of transience in student-led gardens in universities and how to
manage these impacts. The issues explored in this paper are one piece of this study.
I drew on several different methods within the study, including interviews with
students involved in the gardens and supporting staff members at the National Union of
Students, workshops with student gardeners, and a research diary. Photovoice was also
employed in the last year of the study, where student gardeners took photos to document their
experiences of how transience impacted their garden and their experiences in their garden. A
thematic analaysis of the data collected was undertaken using eclectic coding (Saldaña, 2015).
Some of the results from these methods are presented in the following section.
Results & Discussion
The main impact of transience was found to be short-term participation. One of the
implications of volunteers taking part over the short-term was that one of the main tasks of
the student-led food gardens came to be to recruit new participants. This put participants in a
position where they were organizing and facilitating ‘rather than just participating’. Because
recruitment was such a central focus, it led to questions about the value and the meaning of
these gardens. Why bother recruiting people to take part if their main task will be to recruit
more people? About this, one former student gardener said, ‘[maintaining participation is]
their number one priority, I guess, but also something that is also taken for granted. And it’s
kind of an existential crisis if they actually identify surviving as an aim.’

However, minimising the need to constantly recruit and using other strategies for
dealing with downstream impacts of transience could draw attention away from this
‘existential crisis.’ Certain characteristics of the physical garden space could make
serendipitous encounters with the student-led food gardens more likely, thereby reducing the
need for such persistent recruitment. For example, having the garden in a central location and
reducing barriers to entry (for example, keeping entrances unlocked and putting the garden on
campus maps) meant people were more likely to stumble across it and feel that they were
welcome to take part. Other characteristics of the garden space could mitigate downstream
impacts of transience, such as having raised beds to reduce the spread of weeds and make the
garden more presentable during periods of low participation. Of this, one student said:
‘I think having the infrastructure there, raised beds, can be quite a good way of
challenging that [the impacts of transience], so you’re not just digging and weeding.’
Having a shared vision, action plan, project narrative, or records of some capacity
(such as records of achievements or past activity) were also identified as ways the gardens
could improve continuity and create a sense of contributing to something bigger. For
example, at one garden, students posted photos of what they did every week on their social
media group to build a sense of continuity into the project even when participants couldn’t be
there every week, had left the university, or were even just starting to get involved:
‘I’m hoping […] just capturing these photos will make a difference in encouraging
people. I know it’s not the same as […] the actual experience you have, but I’m
hoping… that will have an impact on future cohorts coming in.’
These strategies appeared to be operating as boundary objects between 'waves' of
participants to cope with challenges associated with the transience. For example, students
from different waves engage with the boundary objects for different purposes. The student
that posted weekly photos of activities in their garden on social media did so with the
ambition to encourage people to come to gardening sessions. On the other hand, another
student said that they expected that former gardeners were viewing them with to feel
connected to the project:
I’ve not gone away yet. But if I were to look at the page and be back home, I think I
would still feel that connection. Be like, ‘Ohhh… look at what they’re doing!’ Like, you…
‘Look at where it was when I was there, and look at it now.’ I think a connection’s definitely
still there.
A relatively new concept that is related to my proposed concept of cross-temporal
boundary objects is ‘socio-ecological memory’, which is made up of a set of “collectively
shared mental maps for dealing with a complex world” that carry social and “ecological
experiences and revises them over time and between people” (Barthel et al., 2010, p. 256).
Social-ecological memory can contribute to local resilience by retaining knowledge about
management of social and environmental ecosystem services that can be drawn on in times of
crisis (Barthel et al., 2010). A historical gardening-related example was when allotment
gardening boomed during the First and Second World Wars and what had been smaller

pockets of knowledge about local food production was put to use widely across Britain
(Barthel et al., 2010). The concept of cross-temporal boundary objects could help
organisations with transient participants build social-ecological memory into their
organisations.
However, the application and understanding of 'boundary objects' across timescales
presents unique theoretical and practical challenges. (How) does collaboration and
communication can take place between ‘waves’ of participants? Boundary objects are said to
often be used to come to consensus between diverse stakeholders (Baggio et al., 2015), but
how can consensus can be achieved given limited overlap between 'waves' of participants? Is
consensus even desirable or necessary in this context?
Conclusion
Managing the impacts of transience of student volunteers in student-led food gardens
is a considerable challenge, but one worth addressing given the educational potential of such
initiatives. In this paper, I have argued that ‘cross-temporal boundary objects’ and the linked
concept of socio-ecological memory have the potential to address the negative impacts of
transience and contribute to the internal resilience of student-led food gardens and other
grassroots initiatives with transient participants. This can enable these gardens to be more
fruitful seeds for larger-scale sustainable transformations. However, there is still much to be
understood about (1) how cross-temporal boundary objects contribute to social-ecological
memory, (2) the difference between cross temporal boundary objects and other types of
boundary objects, and (3) whether cross-temporal boundary objects can be artificially
implemented. These are future avenues for research which can help develop understandings
of how the impacts of transient participants and volunteers can be managed in student-led
food gardens, urban agriculture initiatives, and in any organization with a transient participant
base.
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