Series | Platypus

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...)

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...)

Imagined Geographies: From Urban Expertise to Rural Health Intervention

 Luisa Madrigal Marroquín  September 30, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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Health interventions move across spaces and geographies that they themselves help to produce. I argue that health interventions organize relationships among places and people. They define where expertise is presumed to reside, who is expected to teach, and who is expected to learn. In doing so, they reproduce an imagined distinction between places even when everyday practice continually blurs those boundaries. This post contends that health interventions designed in Guatemala City do more than travel to communities across the country. They also produce an imagined geography in which urban spaces become associated with expertise, innovation, and authority, while predominantly Indigenous Maya communities are positioned as recipients of external knowledge. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with nutrition and health interventions, I show that this distinction, between the urban spaces of Guatemala City and rural spaces of Indigenous Maya Communities, repeatedly breaks down in practice as communities and fieldworkers, those directly responsible for carrying out the interventions in the communities, reshape interventions and generate knowledge of their own. Yet the interventions themselves continue to reproduce the very rural/urban divide that everyday experience disproves. (read more...)

Transnational Solidarity: Exploring Alternate Global Imaginaries of Work

 Lucy Pei  September 23, 2026

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One day in November 2022, I was meeting with Carolina, one of the main activists of the gig worker union Frente de los Trabajadores de los Plataformas Digitales del Ecuador (FRENAPP) in Ecuador. Carolina was using Canva (a free online graphic design website) to create sample book covers. She had just found a template featuring an epic-looking rendering of the Earth. “Let’s add the different types of gig workers to the top of the world,” she said. She took her time scrolling through different free clipart websites until she was satisfied with the images she pasted on top of the globe (Figure 1). She inserted a placeholder title for the book: “La Precarización en las Empresas de Plataformas a Nivel Mundial” (Precarization in Digital Platform Companies at the Global Level). She included slogans at the top of the sample book covers which translated to “An exploitation with a new economy,” and “If the precarization is global, the fight is international.” She credited the slogans to an international alliance of gig worker organizations of which FRENAPP was a part. In the sample book cover Carolina created, the viewer and the clipart gig workers lie outside of the stylized image of the whole earth. The globe becomes the prominent scale, superseding national borders, buildings, and neighborhoods. Images such as this call the scale of the global into being and visually assert the connection between the cause of gig workers and the scale of the world as a whole. The title of the book reinforces the idea of the global scale. (read more...)

Beyond Delivering Food: Networks, Risk, and the Hidden Infrastructure of Gig Work

 Ambar Reyes  September 16, 2026

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

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I was picking up an order on 67th st and Columbus Ave when I saw the guy get on my bike and start to ride away. I got out of the shop and grabbed him; he said, “Sorry, I thought it was my bike.” A friend helped me hold onto him so we could call the police. The guy tried to break free and reached into a DoorDash bag he was carrying… Suddenly, he pulled out a syringe and started threatening us with it. I let go of his shirt but kept holding onto a backpack he was wearing; eventually, he slipped out of the backpack and ran away. I called the police to hand over the backpack and the DoorDash bag (which contained multiple syringes and a knife), but they never showed up. (read more...)

Reclaiming the Future of Work: Series Introduction

 Lucy Pei, Joy Ming, Kim Fernandes, Rosemary Steup  September 7, 2026

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Debates about the future of work often center around adapting the workforce to fit capitalist proposals of what work should look like. Pre-digital examples include scientific management, just-in-time production, and de-skilling of industrial labor in favor of more mechanized and automated processes. Recently, capitalist proposals of arrangements of work have centered on digital platforms, algorithmic management, pervasive surveillance, and the deskilling of white-collar work through aggressive adoption of large language models (generative AI). In the face of these changes, workers are expected to accept their new, typically more controlled, unstable, exploitative work arrangements, re-train and re-skill to find employment in different or new types of work or face un- and under-employment with whatever safety net might be available. Underlying these changes to work arrangements is a drive for efficiency and profit. (read more...)

Networks of Knowledge Sharing: Becoming-With Mushrooms in Academia

 Jennifer Foley  August 13, 2026

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This piece is one branch of Becoming-With, a multispecies collective autoethnographic project developed with Dani Dilkes, Mandy Penney, and our four mushroom companions (Lion, Pearl, Blue, Pink); from here forward known as the Mushy Collective. Together, we explore what it means to “become-with” mushrooms by thinking through mycelial structures while cultivating fungi and imagining more generative futures for academic spaces. Within this project, my post will explore my personal journey reconsidering resource sharing, writing, care work, and decentralized collaboration through fungal logics. I will turn attention toward the hidden infrastructures that sustain the academy while often remaining undervalued. (read more...)