Metaphors abound for mycorrhiza in both science and fiction. From the “wood wide web” to “mother trees,” “social networks” to “neurological networks,” analogies expand and transform public understanding of the complex and elusive interactions between plants and fungi occurring under our feet in forest ecosystems. However, the line between metaphor and the more-than-metaphorical, fact and fiction, is not always clear, causing heated debates about the role of metaphor in the scientific imagination and science communication. As a mycologist and literary scholar, we enact an interdisciplinary symbiosis inspired by mycorrhiza themselves to explore the mycorrhizal metaphors in the past decade, which are entangling and enriching both science and fiction, from Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016) to Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2020), Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) to Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree (2021). We reaffirm the fundamental value of metaphors in how scientists and nonscientists alike seek to understand fungi in a world increasingly fascinated by and dependent upon them.

The Israeli genocide against Palestinians has revealed a new phase in global imperial politics. Western universities have become key sites at the center of these politics, necessitating new modes of scholarship and engagement with ongoing struggles for liberation. In this article, I outline the process of analyzing a dataset of the hashtag campaign #tweet_like_it’s_free from the 2021 Unity Uprising, where I turn the dataset into a poem. I propose the term “felt analysis” to describe both the sensorial attunement to the tweets and the tactile and embodied component of analyzing them. I investigate the relationship between conducting research during, about, and for a particular moment, attending to the questions: What does it mean to research digital culture in a moment when it is mobilized for resistance as well as oppression? How can we engage in scholarship around technology and resistance that not only documents and understands social movements but also creates opportunities to feel for the moment and help endure and survive it? By weaving the tweets into a poem, I document a feeling from 2021 in 2024, sharing the defiant dreams from a liberated Palestinian future to confront the violence of the present and create an opening toward liberation.

This article explores how informal medicine sellers (IMSs) in Mexico City “contest” and “reassemble” antibiotic control standards in ways that both challenge and respond to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we examine the “rationales”—moral, political, economic, technoscientific, and practical—that IMSs invoke to justify bypassing antibiotic prescription, dispensing and accounting regulations, and the “practical tinkering” they perform to make antibiotics available and “appropriately” used under conditions of scarcity and oversight failure. Rather than viewing IMSs as simply breaking official rules, we adopt a “social life of standards” perspective to argue that their actions reflect localized enactments of antibiotic control—versions shaped by community needs, corruption, poverty, and distrust in public health infrastructures. These practices are ambivalent, blurring boundaries between public service and profit and systemic subversion and informal regulation. By tracking how IMSs adapt, collectivize, and sometimes deliver treatments, we show how antibiotic governance is reworked from below—not only in response to AMR, but also to structural exclusions from formal care. We argue that rather than treating IMS rationales and practices as part of the problem, they should be studied as grounded responses to systemic failure—and potential sources of insight for context-sensitive regulatory design.

How can communities on campus support scholars in developing specific, situated practices for ethical, accountable, impactful collaborations beyond campus? What opportunities can we open by being communally, radically present in our work? In considering these questions, I draw on three-plus years of organizing and facilitating two scholarly Collectives. These Collectives sustain lived community for scholars bending university systems toward liberatory work. From inside these Collectives, I trace seven guiding principles, including 1) learning alongside situated stories (as opposed to abstracted “advice”), 2) analyzing the specific institutional mechanisms we work through, 3) centering joy, 4) reimagining what we call possible, and 5) naming the places where we refuse educational systems’ dangerous expectations. I ground these principles in lived stories with fellow Collective members, celebrating how living alongside one another can open relational scholarships that are respectful, inspiring, undisciplined, and growing into what we need them to be.

What would it mean to build an archive not of texts or images, but of tastes, sounds, silences, and gestures, the fleeting traces through which memory takes shape? This essay proposes “taste archives” as a method within the public humanities for engaging communities around everyday acts of remembering and belonging. Beginning with chai as a personal anchor of migrant memory, I move outward to imagine a framework for archiving food-related stories and practices. The process unfolds in three movements: (1) gathering oral histories through food-centered conversations; (2) recording recipes, smells, tastes, and the sonic-material rhythms that accompany them; and (3) curating these into accessible, community-based collections, whether in libraries, cultural centers, or digital spaces. Along the way, I reflect on questions of consent, ownership, and the difficulty of translating sensory experience into archival form. “Taste archives,” I suggest, democratize heritage by placing ordinary rituals-meals, drinks, shared preparation at the center of cultural memory. By making the invisible histories of migration and daily life tangible and audible, the public humanities can reimagine the archive itself as something that can be sipped, smelled, and heard: a living practice of remembering together.

Vitriolic disputes over trans identity and decolonisation have made university campuses into the battlegrounds of the culture wars. Yet the connections between these controversies and the epistemic function of the academy remain underexamined. In this article, I argue that the structures of oppression and privilege that activists seek to dismantle are sustained by the disciplinarity of the academy. Inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s radical critique of Western humanism, I show how the entrenched division between the sciences and the humanities upholds a biocentric conception of truth that underwrites “Man,” the mode of life that colonises the concept of the human. The article outlines Wynter’s theory of sociogenesis to interrogate the role of the disciplines in repressing awareness of the sociocultural constitution of modes of life, arguing that this denial of discursive construction sustains the hegemony of Man while foreclosing trans liberation. What follows, I suggest, is that the academy’s culture wars crises cannot be resolved through diversity policies. Instead, I call for a transformation of disciplinarity that untethers the academy from the epistemological commitments of Man. Only by eschewing positivism and universalism can institutions of higher education break with the coloniality of gender and contribute to reimagining the human.

What counts as a human and as a proper human life has been a lifelong preoccupation of our species. Today it is digitalism, technology, and AI triggering renewed nightmares and hopeful dreams around being human. Through an examination of Samantha Schweblin’s novel “Little Eyes” (Kentukis in the original), I show how humanities are crucial to (i) keep track of what is new and old in these shifts and (ii) maintain a vigorous public sphere that is qualitatively different from gamified individual and social relations. The result is the defense of an idea of public life that stands beyond our individual private desires, marking a stark contrast with a vision of society in which we relate to others and the public as we would to toys we play with.

This article reflects on the Socratic model for doing public political philosophy. It concentrates on the dialogue form and considers how this form might be adapted to a very different world than the one Socrates inhabited—one that is demographically diverse and huge, highly mediated, and today, intensely polarized. It suggests as well that philosophers are especially suited to facilitating critiques of current conjunctures and predicaments—their organizing terms, assumptions, and frameworks. They do this best through their skills of questioning.

For the Palestinian people, psychic life is just as much a site of struggle for liberation as social life. Palestinians are persistently refused psychological amplitude, characteristics easily granted to those who are never worried they might fall out of what is constituted as the category of the human. Abdaljawad Omar’s writings in English published since October 7, 2023 (as well as writings by other Palestinians, other Arabs, and those of Palestinian descent) offer means of understanding material resistance in relation to the terrain of the psyche. Omar offers distinctive accounts of mourning, loss, and ruins, as well as of how settler colonialism reorganizes experiences of time and relations between past, present, and future. The article reads Omar’s writings against other accounts of mourning and of psychic phenomena that are indebted to psychoanalysis. Omar’s analyses of Palestinians’ resistance to unfreedom and annihilation open up other ways of understanding the psychic vicissitudes of those who suffer, grieve, and struggle to exit a colonial condition characterized by the colonizer’s repeated attempts to break psychic worlds as well as erase bodily life. Understandings of psychic life that do justice to how Palestine is redrawing the world are central to the work of ‘cracking history open’.

The stewardship of wahi kūpuna (Hawaiian ancestral places and resources and the knowledge systems and practices inherently tied to them.) requires an interdisciplinary approach that weaves together Hawaiian and Western knowledge systems. However, for the past century, those not native to Hawaiʻi have held the authority to “manage” Hawaiian heritage. To transform and restore this unbalanced system, there remains a critical need to increase opportunities for Native Hawaiians to care for our own cultural heritage. In 2010, the Native Hawaiian-led non-profit organization, Huliauapa‘a, established the Wahi Kūpuna Internship Program (WKIP). The primary goal of the WKIP is to develop leaders and advocates in Hawaiʻi’s cultural heritage fields by training the next generation of stewards in both Indigenous and Western knowledge systems, so they have a strong cultural foundation, elevate their roles and responsibilities to our lands and communities, obtain higher education degrees, and gain professional career-ready skillsets. The Internship takes a progressive approach that recognizes the constraints of a conventional indoor learning environment, and instead creates an authentic experience for students outside the classroom, on the land, and in the community. Our goal is to re-establish our connections to and care of these ancestral places in order to re-invigorate our cultural practices as a key element of perpetuating our Hawaiian identity and self determination.

This article offers an eyewitness, Venezuelan account of the United States’ January 3 military intervention to extract Nicolás Maduro, situating the operation within a longer history of U.S. hemispheric dominance. It asks how this unprecedented drone- and airpower-based assault reshapes Venezuelan politics, regional dynamics, and the emerging global order. Combining narrative testimony from Caracas with historical context, the piece argues that the intervention revives a Roosevelt Corollary-style logic of policing Latin America while simultaneously legitimizing a more anarchic, sphere-of-influence world. The article concludes that only a transition that empowers Venezuela’s democratic actors can render the intervention legitimate in terms of sovereignty, human rights, and freedom.

Since October 2023, residents of Gaza have been subjected to artificial intelligence (AI) target-generation systems by Israel. This article scrutinises the deployment of these technologies through an understanding of Israel’s settler-colonial project, racial-capitalist economy, and delineation of occupied Palestinian territories as carceral geographies. Drawing on the work of Andy Clarno, which demonstrates how Israel’s decreasing reliance on Palestinian labour made them inessential to exploitation, this article argues that Palestinians are valuable to Israel for another purpose: experimentation. For over fifty years, Palestinians have been rendered as test subjects for the development of surveillance and warfare technologies, in what Antony Lowenstein calls “the Palestine Laboratory.” AI introduces a dual paradigm where both Palestinian lives and deaths are turned into sites of data dispossession. This duality demands keeping Palestinians alive to generate constantly updating data for the lethal algorithmic systems that target them, while their deaths generate further data to refine and market those systems as “battle-tested.” The article describes this state as an algorithmic death-world, adapted from Achille Mbembe’s conception of necropolitics. This article concludes that as Israel exports its lethal AI technologies globally, it also exports a model of racialised disposability.

The political economy of the left has emptied the space of critique. It has articulated an unusual combination: bureaucratic centralism aligned with the expansion of financialization. If, as Marx claimed, historical events appear first as tragedy, the contemporary institutional left—especially in Latin America—has staged a neoliberal play. This has fueled delusion, much captured by the far right. This situation has demanded engagement with the public intellectual role in the Latin American—particularly Brazilian—tradition, in which critical theories have been tied to social forms of resistance against political and economic power. When such powers are reorganized within left-wing programs and governments, engaged intellectuals must confront their field. In this article, we draw on Ruy Fausto’s reflection on the misdirections of the left in its processes of bureaucratization and institutionalization to assess the limits of reformism, the question of left unity, and the conciliatory project with the accumulation regime. From this dialog, we propose taking the critique of financialized capitalism seriously through the decentralization of socialist alternatives, capable of resisting both the homogenizing force of financialization and its top-down imposition by the institutionalist left.

This essay traces the emergence of a linguistically and culturally bifurcated public literary-cultural sphere in Sri Lanka from the early twentieth century to the postcolonial present. It looks at key “moments” in the history of literary-cultural public discourse and argues that different visions of what a Sri Lankan identity could be jostled for influence. However, the colonial political economy under which this literary-cultural sphere developed, and the ensuing majoritarian political developments in post-independence Sri Lanka, overdetermined the linguistically and culturally segregated “form” this literary-public sphere eventually developed. Through the critical exploration of this history, this essay demonstrates that the literary and the political imaginations reproduce each other and that the literary-cultural public sphere is best understood as a contingent space shaped by ideological and political forces that can be both progressive and regressive rather than a normatively progressive or “open” space of public engagement.

This article examines three key debates about Black humor during the Harlem Renaissance, framing them as public “symposia” that reflect conflicting views on comedy’s role in Black cultural and political life. It argues that Harlem Renaissance comedy can be grouped into three categories: repression, rebellion, and revision. While scholars often interpret Black humor as a tool for survival or subversion, this article contends that it is rooted in cynicism—a “Black cynical reason” aware of the illusions of racial capitalism but skeptical that self-aware satire could resist them. Harlem Renaissance comedy critiqued white supremacy but also created internal tensions within the Black community, highlighting the complex relationship between resistance and complicity. The article explores this dynamic through three debates: the 1926 Crisis exchange between W. E. B. Du Bois and Carl Van Vechten, reflected in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Comedy: American Style; the 1926 Nation debate between Langston Hughes and George Schuyler, explored through Schuyler’s Black No More; and Ralph Ellison’s 1958 exchange with Stanley Edgar Hyman in the Partisan Review, examined through Ellison’s essays. The article concludes that while Harlem Renaissance comedy advanced sharp critiques and inspired future activism, comedy itself struggles to produce putative political or social change.

In Bangladesh’s southwest delta, climate adaptation unfolds less through mass migration or master plans than through everyday routes. In August 2023, 40 young people from 5 flood-prone villages mapped 120 geotagged journeys to water points, schools, clinics, markets, and cyclone shelters. Their stories reveal “routes of care” patterns of movement that sustain families and keep communities rooted under pressure. Three practices recur: staying, where repair and mutual support enable life in place; leaving and looping back, where seasonal departures strengthen ties through return; and protection, where circuits of water, health, and education provide survival. These everyday mobilities challenge the binary of migration versus immobility and explain why national strategies such as Tidal River Management and the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 succeed only when aligned with lived routes. Four design principles emerge: map real paths first, value staying as care, support looped mobility, and integrate water, health, and schooling.

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest global health threats, demanding urgent action. However, the threat of AMR and the ability to respond to it are far from evenly distributed. In many parts of the global South, where infectious diseases are more common, healthcare systems are weaker, and the social conditions that shape health are more precarious, the effects of AMR are felt more acutely. Because AMR arises within these unequal conditions, rapid action alone is insufficient; attention to how costs and benefits are distributed, who is prioritised, and whose voices are heard is essential to ensure that efforts do not inadvertently deepen existing inequalities. Hence, as the world prepares to tackle this “complex wicked problem,” it needs to ensure that we not only make a quick transition but also a just one. The first step in ensuring a just AMR transition is examining the fairness of our current strategies. This study critically reviews the National Action Plans of the countries in the WHO Western Pacific Region to examine the extent to which ideas of justice are considered. Findings reveal that there are limited considerations for how the burden and benefits of actions are shared; decision-making is dominated by external and national actors within human health. Access to antibiotics is restricted across the spectrum without adequately expanding and strengthening alternatives. As NAPs undergo revision, there is a need to more consciously and explicitly integrate considerations of justice and equity to avoid unintended harm and ensure effective outcomes.

Since 2018, the Chicory Revitalization Project (CRP) has used vernacular poetry published in Baltimore’s Chicory magazine (1966–1983) as the centerpiece of a public humanities project. Chicory existed at the intersection of the liberalism of the War on Poverty, which funded it, and the radical esthetics of the Black Arts Movement, which inspired it. After digitizing the magazine, the CRP has used Chicory as the basis of poetry workshops, public events, a traveling exhibition, and a new magazine. Through our work, we have come to see the vernacular poetry in Chicory as emotional history and the basis for intergenerational dialogue in the present. More accessible than canonical poetry, vernacular poetry reflects its historical moment through emotion. Building on this emotional connection, we encourage young writers and activists in Baltimore to engage in intergenerational dialogue with the poems and project stakeholders. When we read, interpret, and respond to poems written in the same place decades apart, an essentially civic question arises: What has changed or not? What is the role of place-based art in social justice?