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Mycelial Connections to Past, Present, and Pedagogy: Communities of Practice and Care, My Dad, and Me

 Mandy Penney  November 4, 2026

Mushrooms, and what they inspire through their networked connections through the land, I now realize, have been a part of my personal and pedagogical self for a very long time, in ways both explicit and hidden. Most recently, in our Becoming-With Mushrooms series, Dani Dilkes, Jenny Foley, and I have worked with and alongside our mushroom companions (Pearl, Lion, Blue, and Pink) to imagine Multispecies Collective Autoethnography (MSCoAE) as both metaphor and method for resisting the capitalist and colonial structures of higher education. As I stand in this season of my life – both midcareer and midlife – I have begun trying to articulate the threads that meaningfully weave together my experiences as a child growing up in Newfoundland, as a Biology student and then as an English one, as a graduate student then (and, again, coming up), and as an educator. Through our rich and generative collaboration over the past few months, my colleagues and mushroom companions have prompted me to reflect on the stories that shape me, why I teach in the ways that I teach, and for whom I do this work. (read more...)

Recent

“There is a Ghost in the Box!”: Insightful Surprises From a Note-Taking Archive

 Karina Aranda  November 2, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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The Zettelkasten technique involves writing down your ideas on index cards and assigning them a code that allows you to organize and branch out those ideas to connect them to one another. When you return to your notes weeks, months, or even years later, what you find there often surprises you. Because estrangement and surprise are valuable in research, I want to explain how I believe this phenomenon occurs. In doing so, I argue against the representation of slipboxes as “Second Brains for productivity,” a framing that has become popular in recent years. Instead, drawing on my own experience, I argue for approaching them within a framework of slow, crip temporality—as a way to challenge traditional conceptions of the value of preserving and “managing” knowledge. I propose an experimental perspective, open to fragile modes of existence and knowledge, situated halfway between light and shadow (Souriau, 2016, p. 220). (read more...)

Back to Class: Designing For, With, and Through the Class Struggle

 Eugene, Gena Kim, Nathan Kim  October 30, 2026

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In 2024, members of the Cargill Tenants Union launched two months-long rent strikes in response to deteriorating conditions at their buildings, culminating in a year-long rent freeze, comprehensive lead inspections, air-quality inspections, mold abatements, lease renewals, and state and federal intervention in their support. Tenants in this struggle could indeed avoid putting themselves at risk of eviction if they were to mind their own business and pay their own rent, but instead chose to act together to improve conditions for all tenants and, in so doing, pursue transformative change. Their victory concluded one particularly fiery and successful campaign in the history of the Connecticut Tenants Union, sending waves across the country: this is what militant and well-organized tenants can accomplish. (read more...)

Does Everything Belong Back Home? Rethinking Repatriation in the Brazilian Context

 Amanda Domingues  October 28, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponível em português.

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The process of repatriation—or the return of artifacts to their origin communities around the world—has taken center stage globally, drawing intense interest from anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and museum professionals. It remains as much a domestic (within nations) discussion as an international one. The debate plays out on both scales because there exist at least two opposing views on who owns cultural heritage. One side argues that cultural objects form a national cultural heritage—a view known as cultural nationalism (Merryman 1986). In contrast, those who advocate for a cultural internationalism view these objects as part of a shared human culture that belongs to all humanity. From this international perspective, an artifact’s country of origin or current location does not matter because cultural property belongs to “everyone” (Appiah 2009). Therefore, protecting and preserving it becomes everyone’s interest and responsibility. (read more...)

Unfinished Bodies: Cosmetic Surgeries Among Aging Sex Workers in Singapore

 Rong Mu  October 26, 2026

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When I met Mia in her massage parlour, she had recently undergone cosmetic surgery. She openly showed me the sutures, dense and deep, tracing almost her entire hairline. Two weeks earlier, she had travelled to Shanghai for a major facelift involving the lifting and tightening of the skin. She even showed me videos of the operation: the surgeon peels back the skin of her face, pulls it taut, and sutures it into its new position. It reminded me of The Painted Skin in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi), where the demon peels off a face like a mask and replaces it with another. However, what gave Mia her new face was not a supernatural spell but modern surgery: a painful, costly, and carefully planned intervention made possible by highly sophisticated surgical techniques. More important, it carries Mia’s hope for work. Originally from China and now a permanent resident in Singapore, Mia has been working in the sex industry for more than ten years. “I’m fifty now,” she told me. “Just look at all the young, beautiful girls in the building. If I don’t undergo cosmetic surgery, what choice do I have? How could I ever compete with them? I need to survive. I still have to work and make money.” For Mia, cosmetic surgery was crucial to both her work and her future. If her appearance determined her competitiveness in the market, then surgery was an investment in her livelihood. (read more...)

A One-Trick Pony Among Poly-Metis at the 16th ESOCITE Congress

 David Antolínez  October 21, 2026

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Sing, Muse, of the triumphs and tribulations of Latin American scholars gathered to discuss the fragile threads linking Science, Technology, and Society. Sing, Muse, of the congress held earlier this year in Colombia, barely a couple of days after the presidential election with the rising shadow of fascism. Sing, Muse, of that uneasy feeling, sharpened throughout three days of intellectual exchange, leading to the realization that our inquiries must choose between the Scylla of romanticism and the Charybdis of rationalism. From the beginning I felt the hospitality of the professors of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, despite them being busy with final arrangements. Too aware of my peripheral role in this community, I decided to stay at the margin and pay close attention to others. A feminist ethnographer working with textiles gave the inaugural lecture. She started by confessing her ambivalent feelings about the usefulness of these international meetings. She next remembered one of the first congresses of the Latin American network, where John Law eagerly spoke about non-human agency. Despite the lack of remuneration and the inevitable waste (printed materials, disposable coffee cups, megabytes of stored files in the cloud, etc.), the committee accepted the challenge of hosting the 16th Congress of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (ESOCITE), hoping it would be an opportunity to connect different researchers and projects. The nostalgia in the room was almost palpable. (read more...)

Broilers That Can’t Even Fend for Themselves: Mother Hens and Production Infrastructures

 Maria Isabel Trivilin  October 19, 2026

Este conteúdo também está disponivel em português.

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‘chickens take care of themselves, they live all around, withstanding by themselves’; they know how to ‘eat lizards, crickets, just to withstand and stay around here’ — João Karitiana, apud Vander Velden (2025) Among the Karitiana, a people from the southwestern Brazilian Amazon, there is a specific way of referring to certain animals raised in large numbers. Translated as “to grow,” kerep designates, among others, chickens, animals that do not need to be cared for directly by humans, managing on their own to find food. Even in domestic backyards, someone feeds them, which does not prevent them from finding earthworms and other things around them. But survive they do. In rural Brazil, chickens are raised free-range, fed corn or cracked corn, scratching freely around the yard. As Vander Velden explains, drawing on João Karitiana’s words, chickens take care of themselves, regulate their own rhythms and maintain a relatively independent existence. They “withstand on their own” and remain, in a way, apart from the human community they live in. (read more...)

Listening with Whales: Song, Grief, and Obligation Across Ways of Knowing

 Marie Comuzzo  October 15, 2026

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Whether through awe and wonder or death and grief, human-whale relations throw into relief important epistemic, ethical, spiritual, legal, and scientific tensions. Because whales migrate across oceans and have long been in relation with humans across the globe, they inhabit multiple and often conflicting worlds of meaning and obligation. What happens in the aftermath of a whale’s death, when a whale might simultaneously be an ancestor, a source of scientific knowledge, and a potential threat to the continuation of a local ecotourist economy? (read more...)