Dissertation Defense: Meredith Degyansky

Meredith Degyansky
Friday October 17, 2025
12:00pm-3:00pm
Zoom: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/6191241549?omn=97172905620 and Machmer E24
Advisor: Amanda Walker Johnson

Title: Searching for Otherwise: Occupation, rupture, and Wildness On/With/As Part of a 12-Acre Plot of Land

Abstract:
This dissertation is a study of an immigrant-led worker-owned cooperative farm situated in Western Massachusetts. It details the ways colonial capitalist modernity has designed us to be particular types of humans, and how we might re- or un-design ourselves away from the dominant logics and practices that are destroying life. 

In the first section, "Fight the Ontological Occupation, the Ongoing Apocalypse", I ethnographically chronicle our work on the farm which emerged in 2019 in the wake of the first Trump presidency and in response to the ongoing exploitation of immigrant farmworkers in the Connecticut River Valley. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the cooperative quickly became part of a mutual aid network that fed communities for free and a node in a regional solidarity economy. I unravel the ways we were constantly up against the ontological occupation of western modernity, how it continually designed us back. I use the year the farm received a $140k grant as a starting point to theorize our capture, which enabled us to buy tractors, implements, and plastics, and how those "designs" drastically shifted the way we were working on the land the year before, what we desired and imagined.  

I deepen my argument by tracing the history of "progress" in this landscape – how fences, tractors, pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, plastics, weed whackers, lawnmowers, as well as markets, paperwork, leases, permits, and standards – designed the world, and how that very world continues to design us. Through sifting through land deeds, archives, museums, and oral stories,  I show how land became "land"; how farmers (and others) became "professionals" (and therefore relied on enslaved labor); how lawn mowers designed "lawn mowers" (people who mow lawns); how supermarkets designed "perfect" vegetables; how herbicides designed "weeds", pesticides "pests", and so on. 

In the interlude, "Ontological Rupture, The Fallow Year", I recount a conversation with a non-profit organization who was considering buying the farm's produce but decided not to because of the racial make-up of the farm. I use this meeting to argue for a constructivist politics steeped in solidarity across difference, rather than an identity politics subject to elite capture, making the case that the latter's attachment to liberal progressivism holds back our movement toward collective liberation. That same season, we took a rest to re-group as a co-op and let the land lay fallow. During the fallow year, various community members' had repulsed reactions to the "wild" land. I use their reactions to theorize the fallow wild land as a necessary ontological rupture toward re/designing worlds; situating the land as a fugitive guide that can help us find our way out of the dominant modernist imaginary. 

In the final section, "Build An Ontological Otherwise", I join calls from anthropologists pointing us toward the speculative as a way of navigating these uncertain times. Here, we go "wild". I home in on ways of knowing, being, and doing of the past, present, or yet-to-be-imagined attempting to re/communalize all webs of life. I follow the lunar calendar of these Nonotuck lands and trouble the dominant onto-epistemic order by destabilizing the modern "human", linear notions of time and progress, and the borders between ourselves, others, the land, rocks, animals, spirits, plants, ancestors, plastics, pasts, presents, futures, and so forth.