Date of Award

Summer 6-20-2026

Document Type

Thesis (Master's)

Department or Program

Master of Arts in Liberal Studies

First Advisor

Dr. Charis Boke

Second Advisor

Dr. Donald Pease

Third Advisor

Dr. Maron Greenleaf

Abstract

Abstract

In this historically grounded and ethnographically rich study, the thesis examines how land, agriculture and institutional practice at Dartmouth College are deeply entangled with longer histories of settler colonialism and imperial expansion, tracing these dynamics from the Morrill Acts to the present-day Dartmouth Organic Farm (DOF). This thesis situates the college’s accumulation of more than 27,000 acres within Jeffersonian agrarian ideals, linked land ownership to civic virtue. Focusing on the DOF as a contemporary site of experiential learning and sustainability, the study shows how the farm operates as both a material and symbolic extension of these historical processes. Although framed as a space of ecological stewardship and innovation, the DOF also functions as a form of soft infrastructure: a network of practices, values, and pedagogies that subtly reproduce institutional authority, environmental knowledge systems, and colonial relationships to land. In this way, the farm emerges as a critical terrain where decolonial aspirations intersect with enduring colonial epistemologies. Through a combination of ethnographic and historical methods, including participant observation, interviews, and archival research, the thesis explores how agricultural practices serve as forms of place-making that encode institutional memory and power. Comparative cases, including herb gardens developed in collaboration with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies further reveal tensions between interventionist sustainability models and efforts to reconfigure human–plant relationships. It asks who determines what grows where, what forms of knowledge are preserved or erased in cultivated landscapes, and how such practices sustain or disrupt colonial structures. This thesis ultimately demonstrates that the Dartmouth Organic Farm is not merely a site of sustainable agriculture but a layered socio-ecological system in which histories of empire are both reproduced and contested, illuminating the complex entanglements of ecology, governance, and settler colonialism in contemporary higher education.

 

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