Seeing Beyond the Joshua Trees in the East Mojave
Tracing the ecological history of the Mojave National Preserve, Julia Sizek questions what was really lost in the Cima Dome Fire that killed swathes of Joshua trees.
Category: Essays
Attuning the Senses
In this multimedia meditation, Petra Rethmann describes how the practice of sensorial attunement (or attention to the world around her) brought healing and clarity to her pandemic isolation.
Be Like Water, An Abolitionist Relationality (Part II)
What does abolition look like? Ki’Amber Thompson discusses the need for more abolition visuals and how the Charles Roundtree Bloom Project brings outdoor healing justice to youth impacted by incarceration.
Finding Connection and Resisting Extraction in Quarantine Gaming
During the COVID-19 pandemic, video games offered Nat Mesnard and many others an escape from isolation. But the false promise of endless productivity in factory building games like Satisfactory ensnared them in a myth of capitalist “progress.”
What 19th-Century Domestic Manuals Say about Housing as Infrastructure
Leah Marie Becker looks into the ways nineteenth-century domestic manuals portray homes as public infrastructure. This expansive and inclusive notion of infrastructure can inform how we approach environmental health in and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Be Like Water, An Abolitionist Relationality
What does abolition mean for the everyday ways we relate to ourselves, to other humans, to the land, and to the more-than-human world? In this poetic essay, Ki’Amber Thompson wonders how water—and the call to “be like water”—might change the way we think and talk about abolition.
The COVID-19 Pandemic and the National Borders of the Imagination
The COVID-19 pandemic is an international event, but we still think of it in national terms. Juan Meneses outlines the limits of pandemic nationalism and imagines a way forward.
Thinking Beyond the “Wild” Pandemic
Alice Rudge examines how the language of “nature” has amplified xenophobia and reinforced colonial moral hierarchies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tea Gardens and Geographies of Colonial Exploitation
Tea gardens in West Bengal are steeped in legacies of British colonialism. Chandreyi Sengupta, Mrinmoyee Naskar, and Debajit Datta trace the lingering social and environmental impacts of the 19th-century plantation system.
Photographing Isolation and Connection in the Stars
Astrophotography saw Kaitlin Moore through months of COVID-19 lockdown, developing connections among the universe’s most isolated subjects.
