Watch Documentary: Law in Bloom
I’m Vanessa Amsinger, a training legal anthropologist and filmmaker working at the intersection of ethnography, visual media, and urban studies. I earned my B.A. in Visual Ethnography from Swarthmore College, where I designed a special major combining Anthropology, Sociology, and Film & Media Studies. My research uses documentary film and sensory ethnography to examine how bylaws, land trust agreements, and informal authority shape participation, governance, and belonging in urban community gardens.
Originally from the New York City metropolitan area, I’ve long been drawn to voluntary outdoor spaces as sites where law is lived rather than simply enforced. I am currently an M.A. student in Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at NYU, where I am expanding my research to New York City and London community garden networks. Across my projects, my work foregrounds legal consciousness, collective governance, and the everyday negotiations that make shared urban space possible.
As a child, I grew up climbing the concrete playgrounds of Manhattan and practicing basketball inside the echo chambers of urban gymnasiums. I was raised in spaces defined by boundaries, regulation, and structure. Craving something less confined, I began college at Colorado College, drawn to the boundless terrain of the Rocky Mountains. There, I took up fieldwork in national and state parks, only to realize that regulation governs even the most “wild” landscapes.
The realization brought me back to cities: Philadelphia, New York, and London, and to the questions that now guide my work. How do rules, both written and unwritten, shape who has access to space? How do community-driven projects like gardens challenge or reproduce structures of power, exclusion, and belonging? And how do people navigate the law—sometimes working within it, sometimes pushing against it—in the pursuit of collective land use?
Research Interests
Legal anthropology; legal consciousness; legal pluralism; community governance; visual ethnography; urban land use; ethnographic and documentary film; informal authority; public space; land justice; network theory; critical legal studies; sensory and semiotic storytelling
📄 Read the full thesis here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wgYNmtuht6TZpOo8YoPU7prxokOfiO_e/view?usp=sharing