What does turn-of-the-century “Change of Air” travel reveal about the role of vacationing in U.S. culture and society today? Alexis Schmidt examines the historical transition of Change of Air from a legitimate medical prescription into a commodified and efficient vacation on the coast—a cultural attitude that persists in “health” vacation narratives to this day.
What can we learn from lichens about the air we breathe? Lucy Sabin shares her creative research on sensing atmospheres with lichens as proxies.
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.
Christy Tidwell traces the history of taxidermy, its connections to the Gothic horror genre in pop culture, and its spooky connotations.
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?
Dylan Couch traces the complex connections between Aldo Leopold’s conservation land ethic, worsening wildfire risk, and archival precarity that threatens not only living and physical things, but collective memory.
Ann Xiaoxu Pei explores the whale as a historical symbol of extractive capitalism through sensory remediation in Deke Weaver & Jennifer Allen’s performance Cetacean.
Edwin A. Abbott nineteenth-century novel Flatland is often described as a science (or mathematical) fiction. Valeria Zambianchi argues that it can be read as climate fiction as it shows that the possibilities to combat climate crisis are already present in our world.
In this entry to the Troubling Time special series, Caroline Abbott explores a medieval furrow near her home in Cambridge and finds its connections to time, memory, and multispecies entanglements.
Running out of podcasts? Fret not. Edge Effects editors have a list of environmental podcasts that they think you should listen to. This list encompasses a wide range of topics related to environmental and social change, including climate activism, corporate greenwashing, mining conflicts, and more.
