Tag: companion species

Networks of Knowledge Sharing: Becoming-With Mushrooms in Academia

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...)

Becoming-with Mushrooms: Multispecies Collective Autoethnography for Reworlding Educational Environments

“Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched together.” — Sheldrake, 2020 “Multispecies relationality tuned to the temporal and semiotic registers makes evident a lively world in which being is always becoming, becoming is always becoming-with.” — van Dooren, 2016 Higher education in Canada is currently in a state of fragmentation, isolation, and disconnection, due in large part to shifting institutional motivations and ideologies, emerging technologies, political upheaval, and ecological estrangement. (read more...)

Making Companion Species at a Robotics Lab

I spent many a warm summer day holed up inside a robotics laboratory, analyzing various datasets for my Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research project. The room was often dark and the windows were small. My desk, located in the left corner furthest from the entrance, rarely received any sunlight. On several days, the lab would be empty. I’d be left with nothing but the company of browning tube lights, dangling cables and wires, and robots used in the lab’s Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) experiments. (read more...)