Interspecies Relationality: Tending to Affect in The Wood Wide Web Debate in Fungal Science

Morgaine Lee
 Anthropology
Simon Fraser University, MA
Unceded Coast Salish Territory

Abstract

In the last several years, scientific debates about the roles fungi play in nature have been brought to mainstream public attention by way of the ‘wood wide web’. The debate about the roles of fungi in nature concerns the larger implications of what it means that fungi act and build relationships in agentive and creative ways. In this paper I use affect theory, feminist posthumanism, and critical discourse analysis to address fungal interspecies affectual relations as written in wood-wide-web science, tending to the agentive ways fungi build relationships with other species. I argue that tending to affectual pulls (Stewart, 2007) in the complex relationality between mycologists, fungi, and trees in wood wide web science teases out underlying assumptions about nature and interspecies relationships that go beyond Western scientific rationality. In doing so, I propose thinking with fungi supports the anthropological endeavor of pushing past the boundaries of rational Western scientific thought as they move us to challenge our anthropocentrism and to imagine alternative scientific narratives beyond the limits of human exceptionalism.

Reverence and Revolution: Japanese Spiritual Ontologies and Generative Ecological Praxis

Max Abu-Laban
Environmental and Sustainability Studies 
Acadia University, BA (Hons)
Unceded Mi’kma’ki Territories

Abstract

It is difficult to overstate the severity of the environmental crises presently destroying Planet Earth. It is equally true that without radical social and economic change in the immediate decades, our species and countless others will face increasingly grim futures of accelerating instability, runaway global warming, and ultimately, extinction. As one response to this unprecedented and profoundly immediate task, I propose in this article a synthesis of threads found in Japanese and East Asian spiritual ontologies such as Shinto, Zen, wabi-sabi, and Tao, with generative anticapitalist theory to advance a set of proposals for political and philosophical mobilization, which I refer to as ‘ecological praxis.’ Inspired by a four-month academic exchange in Japan, I argue that themes of ecological reverence found in these philosophical currents would be most effectively actualized within the domain of revolutionary politics. Likewise, I argue that these rich ontologies might be rescued from their current state, which is largely one of political uselessness and capitalist saturation, through this ‘left-turn’ that I am suggesting. This takes the form of a two-part exploratory analysis; first, of the current environmental destruction unfolding in Japan and the inability of reverence-based spiritualities to prevent it, and second, of the synthetization of these ontologies with radical theory, with the aim of inspiring and informing generative ecological praxis.

Queer Formalism, Radical Formalism, and Surface Aesthetics: The Anticipatory Work of Howardena Pindell

Cicely Haggerty
Art History and Conservation, MA
Queens University
Unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek Territories

Abstract

In the catalogue for Black feminist artist, writer, and educator Howardena Pindell’s 2018 retrospective What Remains to Be Seen (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2018), curator Valerie Cassel Oliver describes her work as “a convergence on tensions between formalist and social concerns, [which] underscore the artist’s commitment to free-range experimentation in abstract and social responsibility” (116). Pindell’s abstract paintings are an obvious example of this convergence; her subversive use of the grid shifts it from a “formal device to an actionable device – one that expands into the tactile and becomes materialized, embodied, and mutable” (Beckwith, 94). However, as Naomi Beckwith observes, even in Pindell’s “autobiographical” works, “personal experiences and aesthetic processes acquire equal weight” (96). Throughout her diverse practice, Pindell has consistently utilized the language of formalism in strategic and alternative ways, to communicate messages about her existence as a Black woman, feminist, and artist. To borrow from Pindell, “the way one inhabits a set of circumstances has aesthetic implications.” Belated recognition, such as the 2018 retrospective, has reinforced Pindell’s significance within ‘70s and ‘80s feminisms in the arts. This paper builds on this recognition by showing how her work from these decades anticipates the more recent artistic and theoretical developments of Queer Formalism, Radical Formalism, and Surface Aesthetics. Queer and Radical Formalism work to reappropriate formalism, recognizing how aesthetic form can be a tool for subversion of art historical and art world conventions. Surface Aesthetics similarly rejects the idea that surfaces are “false” and that “truth resides in deep insights,” instead acting as an “analytic for considering how artists circumnavigate corporal limitation and resist over determined interpretations of their work” (McMillan). Although Queer and Radical Formalism and Surface Aesthetics may be critiqued for being “idealistic” or “unmoored from history,” connecting them to a longer history through Pindell’s work serves as a way to ground and contextualize the practices they encompass, which, importantly, “wrest representation from the heterosexist and racist mishandling of history” (Amin, Musser, and Perez, 231). Further, appropriating ideas from the traditional use of Formalism allows for alternative readings and potentials to be drawn from past and contemporary art alike.

Abolitionist Imagination: Re-Mapping Canada’s East Coast Prisons

Write Up and Art By Helen Yao 
Graduate Women and Gender Studies Program 
Mount Saint Vincent University 
Unceded Mi’kma’ki Territories 

Combining visual art and prose, Helen Yao created a creative project entitled "Abolitionist Imagination: Re:Mapping Canada's East Coast Prisons. Yao uses photos of Nova Scotian prisons and paints over them. Combining her artwork with personal prose with references from abolition feminist academics and activists Yao's projects reflects on the way in which insitutional spaces can be places for violence, and reimagines them as spaces of care and compassion.

Helen would like to acknowledge that the construction of prisons and expansion of policing is the modern-day continuation of colonial dispossession and that with this acknowledgement there must be a concrete commitment to dismantling colonial institutions.