relationality | Platypus

Networks of Knowledge Sharing: Becoming-With Mushrooms in Academia

 Jennifer Foley  August 13, 2026

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

 Jennifer Foley, Dani Dilkes, Mandy Penney  June 19, 2026

 Listen to a reading of this post.

“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...)

Feeling Fieldwork: Affectivity, Co-creativity, and Multimodality in Ethnographic Music Production

 Jamie Glisson  November 2, 2023

Jamie Glisson · TUNDRA Listen to ‘TUNDRA’ Ethnographic work is an affective experience. While anthropological research methods have often focused on cataloging ethnographic moments through field notes and interviews, most ethnographers will agree that the written word can’t quite capture what it feels like to be in the field. As a musician, filmmaker, and producer in my work alongside anthropology, I decided to explore how skills associated with my songwriting and sound engineering might further explicate the effervescent quality of what fieldwork feels like on an embodied register. Much like an ethnography, an album comes together through a process of refinement, of connecting what may feel like disparate ideas into a narrative whole. The analytical aspect of ethnographic work also bridges the hemispheres of the brain in a similar way that recording music does. The process of translating emotions, interactions, and expression through sound relies on a basic understanding of (read more...)