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...)

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...)