Urban food foraging is a multifaceted ecologically situated practice beginning to attract scholarly attention. This paper explores the wild food gathering practices of Karenni people, an ethnic community from eastern Myanmar, who have recently arrived as refugees in Wollongong, Australia. It shows how interstitial city spaces – creek banks, train lines, edges of footpaths and unplanted spaces in botanic gardens – occupy a central place for some migrant and refugee communities with respect to food. The plants sought by Karenni people grow almost exclusively in disturbed and interstitial spaces. Through the case study of the Karenni community, this paper illustrates how ontological diversity produces multiple ecological knowledges. These culturally distinct ontologies can help reassign the value ascribed to places, peoples and practices otherwise seen as marginal. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence from semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and community co-researcher collaboration. The findings of this paper argue that the ecological knowledge produced by refugees and migrant communities can render more nuanced understandings of human-plant, human-environment relationships. Culturally diverse appetites bring liminal spaces to life in unexpected ways. Paying attention to the food foraging practices of ethnic-minority communities results in a richer understanding of what I term the ‘edible environment’.

This paper explores the possibility of reading the spatiality of the second hand book market in College Street, Calcutta through the play of history and contemporary everyday life. In doing so I will analyse how the play of memory, nostalgia and contemporary everyday life makes the boipara (neighborhood of books) a space of resistance and liminality.
College Street in Calcutta features an extensive series of makeshift bookstalls, a number of major and small scale publishing houses; a coffee house named Albert Hall established in 1876 and is also the primary education quarter of the city. Once a breeding ground for leftist, progressive, intellectual, politically conscious and aggressive cultural, social and political practices- a space where art, culture, theater, cinema, literature and other forms of creative expression thrives- College Street still strives to fight for its alternative identity braving the ever changing nature of the city, especially in post-globalized times.
The paper investigates how the reading of the everyday life of this space, help us in understanding the nature of this precinct as a system producing emergent associations. It explores the unfolding of the everyday as an assemblage that works with the logic of “simulation and emergence”.