Cultivating Home: Nepali Migrants and Gardening as Everyday Rhetoric
Presentation Room
Blumberg Auditorium, Library Room 111
Presentation Type
Plenary Session
Start Date
24-4-2026 9:45 AM
End Date
24-4-2026 11:00 AM
Abstract
Rhetorical knowledge is often discussed through formal institutions and textual traditions, leaving everyday community practices underexamined. This paper engages the theme “Rhetoric from the Margins” by examining how Nepali migrants’ gardening practices in Hooksett, New Hampshire produce knowledge outside dominant academic and institutional frameworks. I ask: How do Nepali migrants use gardening as a way of making meaning, sustaining memory, and cultivating belonging in unfamiliar environments? In what ways does gardening function as a rhetorical and epistemic practice through which migrants carry and transform land-based knowledge across borders? Rather than treating gardening simply as leisure or subsistence activity, I examine it as a form of everyday rhetoric through which migrants interpret place, negotiate identity, and recreate home. Methodologically, the paper draws on community-engaged ethnographic approach, including interviews, conversations, and observations with Nepali gardeners. I read gardening practices—planting, exchanging seeds, sharing labor, and caring for land—as rhetorical acts that circulate knowledge, values, and memories within the community. This approach foregrounds everyday labor and relational practices as sites where knowledge emerges from lived experience. The paper contributes to rhetorical studies by showing how migrant gardening practices generate epistemologies from the margins—forms of knowledge grounded in land, care, and community rather than institutional authority. By centering these practices, the project highlights how migrants actively create meaning and belonging through shared labor and relational knowledge-making, revealing rhetoric as something that unfolds not only in texts and institutions but also in everyday acts of cultivating and caring for land.
Cultivating Home: Nepali Migrants and Gardening as Everyday Rhetoric
Blumberg Auditorium, Library Room 111
Rhetorical knowledge is often discussed through formal institutions and textual traditions, leaving everyday community practices underexamined. This paper engages the theme “Rhetoric from the Margins” by examining how Nepali migrants’ gardening practices in Hooksett, New Hampshire produce knowledge outside dominant academic and institutional frameworks. I ask: How do Nepali migrants use gardening as a way of making meaning, sustaining memory, and cultivating belonging in unfamiliar environments? In what ways does gardening function as a rhetorical and epistemic practice through which migrants carry and transform land-based knowledge across borders? Rather than treating gardening simply as leisure or subsistence activity, I examine it as a form of everyday rhetoric through which migrants interpret place, negotiate identity, and recreate home. Methodologically, the paper draws on community-engaged ethnographic approach, including interviews, conversations, and observations with Nepali gardeners. I read gardening practices—planting, exchanging seeds, sharing labor, and caring for land—as rhetorical acts that circulate knowledge, values, and memories within the community. This approach foregrounds everyday labor and relational practices as sites where knowledge emerges from lived experience. The paper contributes to rhetorical studies by showing how migrant gardening practices generate epistemologies from the margins—forms of knowledge grounded in land, care, and community rather than institutional authority. By centering these practices, the project highlights how migrants actively create meaning and belonging through shared labor and relational knowledge-making, revealing rhetoric as something that unfolds not only in texts and institutions but also in everyday acts of cultivating and caring for land.