Gardening as care: rewriting a research paper in the first person

We often approach academic writing as the crafting of an argument which needs to be conveyed following preset formulae or, more restrictively, as an exercise of legitimisation within an international academic community. Conventions have indeed helped researchers to share ideas smoothly across the decades; however they present important limitations as they trace a hard boundary between the sayable and the unsayable and consequently between what can be thought or not.¹  Just as a way of example, they involve to a large degree making ourselves invisible; they entail a rigid structure for presenting one’s ideas which does not usually reflect how the ideas actually emerged and how the thinking was constructed. Over recent years however, many researchers throughout the world have started to seek and celebrate more pleasurable, expressive, and accessible ways of academic writing.² My contribution is intended as part of that conversation as I pilot the rewriting exercise of an article in progress trying to reach a more narrative style. In particular, I aim to engage the way in which I navigated the site, the city, the historical moment and the theoretical context of the research narrated; I will reinvite, as characters or in-text persons, the fellow humans who guided me and accompanied me in that journey and I will involve both my subjective sensitivity and my intellectual excitement about the subject as I write.