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.”
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.
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 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.
Alice Rudge examines how the language of “nature” has amplified xenophobia and reinforced colonial moral hierarchies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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.
Astrophotography saw Kaitlin Moore through months of COVID-19 lockdown, developing connections among the universe’s most isolated subjects.
The way early American scholars studied Beowulf reveals their investments in white Anglo-Saxonism and stolen land. Maxwell Gray considers the consequences of white settler scholarship on Native American lands.
In the 1960s, environmentalists often pitted the “natural self” against “artificial” social identities like race, class, and gender. Alexander Menrisky argues that this vocabulary still obscures issues of environmental justice in the U.S. today.
Environmental nationalism has shaped US public lands and outdoor recreation. Jesse Ritner outlines its roots and imagines a way forward.
