2024 Year in Review
2024 has been an incredible year for Edge Effects. We published our seventh special series on Troubling Time, which interrogated environmental ideas, spaces, processes, and problems through the lens of temporality. The series drew in knowledgeable voices from all over the world—many of which have been featured below. Our podcast spoke with poets, scholars, and community leaders on a wide range of environmentally-related topics, with the help of fantastic guest hosts largely from UW-Madison. In October, the magazine celebrated ten years of publishing by collaborating with the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) on a special list of environmental children’s books. And just recently, we expanded our translation efforts to Chinese, hoping to add more to the collection in the coming year.
As always, here are our editorial board’s favorite picks from this year. We hope you enjoy revisiting these pieces or reading/listening to them for the first time! And keep an eye out for big things in 2025—including the announcement on how to participate in our newest special series, coming soon.
“What Lichens Teach Us About the Air We Breathe” by Lucy Sabin
I’m drawn to discussions of speculative practices—excavating the past to understand the present, extrapolating the present to see the future. In this essay, Sabin uses lichens to remind us of the value of multispecies perspectives on our past, present, and future. Lichens can survive in damaged landscapes—whether the conditions are naturally inhospitable, like the Arctic, or somewhat apocalyptic from industrial ruin. Sabin tells us how lichen can model a type of environmental sensing that’s both participatory and creative, allowing us to take part in citizen science to gauge and sense environmental toxicity that transcends our traditional modes of knowledge-making.
– Laleh Ahmad
“Imagining National Belonging in American Landscapes” by Tomiko Jones
This exhibit is a captivating photo-essay. I love the way Jones incorporates elements of personal narrative while describing her approach to photography and her artistic project These Grand Places. The essay explores the complex ways that Jones’s history as a child of immigrants influences how she engages with landscapes and sites of both cultural and geographic interest. Her work reveals the complexities of belonging in a specific place and seeks to capture spaces in transition because of human activity. The stunning photographs compliment the essay’s multiple and layered stories, from the technical process of photographing an owl she accidentally hit with her car to travels across the U.S., from Hawai’i to Wisconsin and the American Southwest.
– Tessa Archambault
“The Matter with Time” by Monica Szuba
What’s the matter with time? It’s a complicated question and one that Szuba untangles in elegant prose. This special series essay contends with the geologic scales of deep time that confound human comprehension and gesture toward narratives outside an anthropocentric lens. Material remnants represent expanded timescales and geological processes, nearly-vanished worlds enmeshed with other human and nonhuman matters. The matter of time, Szuba tells readers, are fossilized records that are always in flux thanks to the elements. They are “storied” matter that imagine more-than-human narratives and undermine human exceptionalism. Szuba juxtaposes the narrative value of these erosive materials with the plastics we discard daily, but which will nonetheless remain for thousands of years—resilient to decay, themselves becoming kinds of anthropogenic fossils. It’s a thought-provoking piece that renders plastics, bones, and fossils the stuff of shared histories and potential futures. We just have to know how to read them.
– Dylan Couch
“Avian Drones Take Flight at the Expense of Real Birds” by Amy Gaeta
First of all, take a look at the cover image: a billboard announcing, “Birds Aren’t Real.” This picture alone promises a good read, and Gaeta’s essay delivers with a topical and compellingly disturbing story. Gaeta considers how the increasing prevalence of drones speaks to contemporary Western views of nature as destined for human consumption. At the same time as the world’s bird populations plummet, the sky is filling with drones that look increasingly like birds, deployed for recreational, commercial, and military use. Gaeta teases out the white supremacist, settler colonial worldview behind this technology that appropriates animal life to perpetrate control. If you’re curious about animal-machine hybrids, the surveillance state, or whatever is happening in the skies of New Jersey, I recommend this essay.
– Ellie Kincaid
“Trilliums as Kin in Victorian Archives” by Ellie Kincaid
Many of us have experienced the gentle ways in which plants have shaped momentous times in our lives. In this essay, Kincaid reflects on the wildflower trillium as a form of kin. They trace the many landscapes and moments during which trilliums have played a significant role in their lives from their childhood in North Carolina, to their grandfather’s illness, to eventually finding home and belonging in Wisconsin. Deeply connected to Kincaid’s personal experience of trilliums is their academic interest in them as they come across pressed trilliums in an 1883 herbarium at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Archives and Special Collections. Linking this art of noticing trilliums between Victorian archives and ancestral legacies, Kincaid’s essay is a tender reflection on the ways that plants inhabit our lives, whether during times of precarity or as a way to form multispecies relationships of care. This essay is a must read for all the budding gardeners and plant lovers out there!
– Kuhelika Ghosh
“Architectural Flows of Settler Colonialism and Resistance” by Anamika Singh
This year was an extraordinary one for resistance on college campuses. Among the amazing articles and podcasts Edge Effects published this year, Singh’s thoughtful commentary on protest encampments against the war in Palestine stands out as a powerful contribution. Integrating art, photography, stories, and scholarship, Anamika deftly locates universities at the nexus of settler colonial power, from the US to the Middle East. She artfully navigates the entanglement of the “Ivory Watch Tower” with the colonial pedagogy and property relations that colonialism requires. Along the way, she gives us the language to articulate why tents—structurally fragile and temporary as they are—become such enduring symbols of resistance and futurity. The tents may have come down, but they are standing (out) in my memory of 2024.
– Rebecca Laurent
“Translation, Rage, and What Is-Was-Willbe: A Conversation with Khairani Barokka” by Jagravi Dave
In this podcast episode, Dave interviews Barokka/Okka on her new poetry collection amuk. But they also have a compelling conversation about art, life, and existence with no linguistic tenses. Through speaking about poetry and sharing a must-listen reading from the page by Okka herself, the two grapple with the multi-dimensional violence of colonialism and how to use rage to respond to entangled personal, political, and environmental issues. Okka brings a sincere warmth and brightness not only to the subjects that bring her joy—particularly her familial experiences growing up in Indonesia—but somehow also to the subjects that enrage herself and others. It was a joy not only to listen to this podcast in its final form, but to produce it along with these amazing guests.
– Bri Meyer
“What Time is the Nomad?” by Natasha Maru
In this poetic special series essay, Maru shares about the nomadic pastoralist Rabari community from Kachchh, India and the unique ways they experience time and temporality. Far removed from the world of clocks and Gregorian calendar months that most of the world uses to keep track of time, the Rabaris are more intuitively attuned to the rhythms of the earth. Maru paints an evocative picture as she travels with the community and learns of their relationship with the environment, how their movements are dependent on crop and weather cycles, and the ways in which their subjectivities and sensory experiences shape their perspectives, as they grapple with climate uncertainties and global capitalist structures. The lifestyle of the Rabaris compels us to ponder over the nonnormative ways in which different cultures might experience time and why we should care about it.
– Prerna Rana
“The Deep Roots of Plant Time” by Yota Batsaki
Recognizing the coexistence of beings inhabiting the contemporary world implies the convergence of multiple timelines that, in a set of complex historical relationships, could be navigated through plants. In this essay, Batsaki presents a view of On Growth, a metal sculpture by Kapwani Kiwanga located on the High Line in New York City. The installation of a fern in dichroic glass resembles the technologies of colonial transplantation and imperial quests for bioprospecting, but also retrieval and survival, in a time spectrum that transcends human experiences. In the recognition of other-than-humans, Batsaki presents the emergence of multiple timelines as a way to imagine environmental justice beyond the anthropocentric notions of time.
– Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey
Featured image: Stylized illustration of a cozy forest dwelling. Art by David Revoy, 2024.
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