2025 Year In Review

2025 was a year of art, multispecies relationalities, and community at Edge Effects. We are proud to have brought together diverse artists, scholars, and activists in conversation and collaboration in our essays, podcasts, exhibitions, illustrations, and poetry this year.

We are particularly blown away by the contributors to our 2025 special series, Companion Species. From Harriet Ritvo’s thought-provoking introduction to Mia Werger’s poetic conclusion, we featured fifteen essays on the complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. The series spans from underground to under water, from pets to feedlot animals and predators to caricatures, from the virtual to the physical to the invisible, and from captivation to ambivalence, fear, and disgust. This series, and 2025 as a whole, is truly a testament to not only the breadth of multispecies relations and perspectives, but also the collective power of our community.

In the midst of this year’s tumultuous political climate, we’ve been working to grow our community across borders and divides. We published our first bilingual podcast and a collaboration with the Women In Translation Circle (4W-WIT) at UW-Madison, as well as launched our ongoing Translation Tuesday series. 2025 has thus also been a year of resistance at the linguistic “edge.”

We had so much fun publishing and growing Edge Effects this year. Below are just a few of our favorite essays, podcasts, and exhibits. If you haven’t yet, consider subscribing to our monthly newsletter to see what we get up to in 2026!

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“Snapshots of the Anthropocene in Iran” by Angelica Modabber

Modabber opens her piece with a quote from the Iranian writer Forugh Farrokhzad’s poetry, “Our neighbors plant bombs and machine guns, instead of flowers, in their garden soil,” and then writes “Their garden is dizzy.” This hooked me immediately, and I’m glad it did: This photo essay took my breath away. Modabber explores memory through landscapes that are scarred and ghostly, while remaining painfully alive. Iranian photographers Ako Salemi, Hashem Shakeri, Hoda Afshar, and Tahmineh Monzavi situate Iranian people and landscapes in the context of each other—reminding us of the blurred edges between environment and identity, and the social and ecological. Modabber curates a beautiful exhibit, Water and Oil, that resists the erasure of our lands’ and people’s histories.

– Laleh Ahmad

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“The Rise and Demise of Equine ‘Cyborg’ Labor” by Bri Meyer

Horses as city laborers alongside humans might be a distant memory, but Bri Meyer’s essay reminds us that it was not so long ago that they were a consistent presence in urban life. A former Edge Effects managing editor and a scholar of horses, Meyer draws on Donna Harraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” to re-imagine equine labor as cyborg labor. Her compelling prose invites the reader to consider Madison, Wisconsin’s early twentieth century development through this lens. Horses are among the unsung heroes that shaped the urban spaces we inhabit today. Hauling kegs of beer, delivering milk, or transporting passengers across the city, our equine companions provided important services. Pavement gradually replaced dirt roads to make way for the automobile, supplanting the need for horse labor. Meyer offers rich description and historical photographs to upend nostalgic memory and bring to light human-horse entanglements.

– Tessa Archambault

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“Psycho Drain Flies” by Henry Hughes

If you’re attracted to good storytelling and strange subjects, then “Psycho Drain Flies” is the essay for you. In this narrative, author Henry Hughes inspects the fly larvae eking out a living in the school’s bathroom urinals to uncover how they survive in such grim conditions, and in turn, what they might tell us about dwelling in times of heightened ecological precarity. The story that ensues takes the form of an actual investigation, covering, along the way, a range of topics from scientific expertise to Greek mythology and the field of psychology. Rife with dialogue, humor, and vivid descriptions, this story sits a little outside of what we normally publish, making it in essence the perfect “edge effects” piece.

– Dylan Couch

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“Do Cows Appreciate Poetry? And Other Musings On Our Bovine Friends” by Mia Werger

Mia Wegner begins her piece on cattle feedlots, “I wasn’t trying to get too close,” capturing the distance that so many of us feel (and want to feel) from industrial meat production. The personal narrative that follows, accompanied by gorgeous drawings by the author, tenderly closes that distance between cows and readers. Mia’s essay approaches cows living on a feedlot in South Dakota with love and curiosity, inviting readers to wonder with her: What do cows think and feel? How do their experiences exceed their ultimate end as our food? What kinds of relationships might blossom on the feedlot? And, most importantly, do cows appreciate poetry? After reading Mia’s piece, I think the answer might be yes—and I know I appreciate the poetry she offers all of us through this essay.

– Ellie Kinkaid

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“The Colonial Depths of Seasteading” by Ivey Wexler

Ivey Wexler’s essay is a grave warning, so why was it so much fun to read? Ivey sheds light on billionaires’ shady, recent efforts to build their own worlds at sea. Modern “seasteading” efforts, they show, bear striking parallels to Robert Stevenson’s fictional book The Ebb-Tide—and to the all-too-real oceanic colonialism unfolding at the time it was written. The colonial power fantasies of the nineteenth century, in other words, have pooled into the twenty-first century’s rising tide of libertarianism. In seamlessly weaving together fictional events with historical ones and contemporary politics with academic theory, Ivey both raises the alarm bells about seasteading and illustrates the power the humanities wield in world-making and sense-making. And I think we need all the help we can get in making sense of the world today.

– Rebecca Laurent

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“Dark Fiction, Sinister Reality: A Conversation with Brenda Becette” by Bri Meyer

Esta entrevista es mi favorita de este año, porque la perspectiva de Becette es muy interesante, y porque el formato de la entrevista bilingüe es nuevo y divertido. Me gusta especialmente su metodología o manera de pensar, que piensa sobre las perspectivas de las mujeres y sobre el medio ambiente, juntos. Ella dice en la entrevista que “las mujeres, los niños, y el medio ambiente” necesitan que nosotros los defendemos, y esta idea es importante, porque todos pierden poder cuando el medio ambiente es atacado. En esta entrevista (y en el libro de Becette), se nos recuerda que el arte es importante, que las perspectivas de las mujeres y los niños son importantes, que todas estas luchas están conectadas.

This interview is my favorite from this year because Becette’s perspective is very interesting and because the format of the bilingual interview is new and fun. I especially like her method or manner of thinking, specifically that she considers the perspectives of women and the environment, together. She says in the interview that “women, children and the environment” need us to defend them, and this idea is important, because they all lose power when the environment is attacked. In this interview (and in Becette’s book), we are reminded that art is important, that the perspectives of women and children are important, and that all these fights are connected.

– Kayleigh Lobdell

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“Love, Violence, & Respect in Animal-Human Companionship” by Kelsey Dayle John

A sudden eruption of multispecies violence prompts us to reflect on love, respect, and the complex relationalities among humans and animals. Navajo poet and scholar Kelsey Dayle John (Diné) brings to life a quotidian episode of animal violence that unleashes an affective and analytical response, in which animal autonomy puts tension on interspecies relationalities. What happens when momentary violence and fear enter the equation in our relationships with animals? The land emerges in this reflection as a teacher, a counterpoint that helps us understand the structure of interspecies relations beyond management. In her poetic meditation you will find a beautiful reflection on the boundaries between Indigenous communities and their animal relatives that invite us to understand their agency with distance, respect, and trust. 

– Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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Featured image: A paper construction of flowers and the number “2025.” Photo by Kelly Sikkema, 2024.