Could seance be more than just a party trick? Sam Bean, Alison Schultz, Carmen Warner, and Barbara Leckie unpack its overlooked political history, including how the queer group Radical Faeries used seances to articulate an egalitarian, environmentally-connected identity.
Angeline Peterson interviews Jill Jarvis on her forthcoming book project Signs in the Desert through her journey into studying the Sahara. Discussing a variety of sources, they challenge the view of deserts as empty spaces and highlight the Saraha as a vibrant, interconnected ecosystem suffering the aftermath of colonial violence.
Christy Tidwell traces the history of taxidermy, its connections to the Gothic horror genre in pop culture, and its spooky connotations.
Anamika Singh reveals the multi-faceted, longstanding connections between settler colonialism, the ongoing war in Palestine, and the university as both an institutional agent of occupation and a site of resistance.
Books about nature and the environment are a wonderful way to help young readers appreciate our planet. For Edge Effects’s tenth birthday, Megan Schliesman and the CCBC recommend ten environmental children’s books for middle grade readers.
Richard Bednarski connects the forest fires of 1910 to the subsequent media-driven age of fire exclusion policy, despite scientific evidence for fire inclusion. Did years of this practice worsen the United States’s “fire problem” today?
Edge Effects invites scholars from different disciplines to introduce texts on care with the environment. These books also offer varied entries to multispecies and pluriversal topics in the classroom.
Jagravi Dave speaks with Khairani Barokka on her poetry collection amuk. They use the book to connect tenselessness, the violence of colonial translation, and rage across personal, political, and environmental scales.
Cathleen McCluskey speaks with Andrea Brower on the intersections of colonialism, neoliberalism, and plantations in agricultural systems—from Hawai’i and beyond. How might possibilities of a better future be imagined through political and social resistance?
Sophie Chao traces how Marind People of West Papua suffer the effects of monoculture toxicity while also mourning for the waste it produces.