Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge: Issue 37 (2021)

Contributors

name

Alyssa Davis Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located on the 11th floor of the 1907 “Greenwich Flatiron Building” in a historic district of West Village, Manhattan. Founded in 2016, Alyssa Davis Gallery has held 14 exhibitions with emerging artists from both the New York metropolitan area and abroad. Crucible New York is a sister entity of the gallery, offering rare fine art fabrication services.

Rosie Clarke is an MPhil student at the University of Queensland. She is currently researching asexual perspectives on queer theory and young adult fiction. Rosie is also a founding member of the Australasian Post-Humanities, which can be accessed at www.aposthumanities.org.

David R. Gruber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Copenhagen. His current work explores what new materialism and posthumanism can bring to the contemporary neurosciences. He has published in Body & Society, Written Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, among other journals. He is co-editor ofThe Routledge Handbook of Language and Science and author of Brain Art and Neuroscience: Neurosensuality and Affective Realism.

Caitllin Hackett: I grew up on the northern coast of California in Humboldt county, it was there that my love for wild creatures and wilderness itself flourished. I went on to study Fine Art at Pratt Institute and graduated with my BFA in 2009. Working in traditional mediums of watercolor, acrylic, and ink I combine my love for wildlife biology and mythology to create artwork that alludes to the cultural constructs that define the barrier between what is considered Human and what is considered Animal, and how those lives are valued.
Mirroring ancient myths of transformation in often grotesque ways we find in contemporary times that animals are transformed by their interactions with man-made pollutants and the ceaseless expansion into wild spaces. They are altered by the cultural values that determine what animals and what environments are protected and which are consumed.
I am interested in the imagery of these mutations for their mythological allusions as well as their dire environmental implications. In my artwork I hope to remind those who view it that we too are animals, reliant on these same ecosystems and bound by our ties to this fragile place. My paintings operate as visual allegory, fairy tales with warnings just as grim as the classic tales about the price that is paid for human folly.

Rachel Horst is a PhD student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. She is interested in 21^st century literacies as conceptualized through a Deleuzian ontology of difference. In her work she explores the generative confluence of digital technologies, writing-as-becoming, and narrative inquiry for doing theory. She is interested in arts-based and experimental research practices that are calibrated towards the ethico-onto-epistemological and aesthetic nature and poetics of qualitative research and data (non)representation. Informed by decolonial discourse, diffraction, and affirmative difference, Rachel’s work seeks to map theoretically enriched interdisciplinary possibilities. Her work is motivated by an affinity for paradox and joy in the unknown.

Kidiocus King-Carroll is a 5^th Year Ph.D. Candidate in the department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where he is completing his dissertation, “Black Milwaukee and the Queerness of Social Life.”

John Lawton teaches sociology and anthropology at Anne Arundel Community College, and is currently working toward an interdisciplinary PhD at UMBC in Baltimore, Maryland. His research addresses issues of media literacy, online networking and digital sociality.

Abby Lloyd is an artist, curator and performer who lives and works in NYC. Recent exhibitions include ”The Void”, White Columns, NY, NY and “Sunny Side Up”, Sunny NY, NY. Lloyd is also co-owner of the project space “East Hampton Shed & Tow”, East Hampton, NY. She recently published a cookbook “Artists & Recipes”, which is available at Olympia, NY. Lloyd is represented by Sunny NY, NY, NY.

Dr. Christopher Loughnane is a scholar of information, technology, media, phenomenology and digital computing. He currently works as Visiting Research Scholar in Digital Scholarship and Innovation at Auburn University.

Barry Mauer is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and director of the Texts and Technology doctoral program. His recent research is about citizen curating, which aims to bring ordinary people into the production of exhibits, both online and in public spaces, using archival materials available in museums, libraries, public history centers, and other institutions. Mauer publishes comics about delusion and denial, particularly as they affect politics.

Alejandra Ortega is a PhD candidate studying twentieth and twenty-first-century literature at Purdue University. Her current project analyzes the different uses and designs of domestic spaces in literature to develop an interdisciplinary framework for applying spatial theory. She has also recently had work published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.

Craig Saper is a Professor in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC in Baltimore, and previously the Bearman Family Foundation Chair (2012-2015) and Program Director (2012-2015). He was previously on the faculty at Indiana University, University of Pennsylvania, University of the Arts, and the University of Central Florida, where he was the Director of the Texts & Technology Doctoral Program (2002-2005). He is the author of Amazing Adventures of Robert Carlton Brown: Real-Life Zelig of the Twentieth Century (2016), Intimate Bureaucracies (2012), Networked Art (2001), Artificial Mythologies (1997) and has co-edited and introduced volumes on Electracy (2015) and Imaging Place (2009). He has co-edited special issues of Rhizomes on Posthumography (2010) and Drifts (2007). He has edited, with new introductions, editions of Bob Brown's Words (2014), Gems (2014), The Readies (2014), and 1450-1950 (2015), published with Roving Eye Press.

Jen Senko, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and media-activist based in New York City, is known for her award-winning documentaries, Road Map Warrior Women (2000) and The Vanishing City (2010). Senko’s 2016 documentary, The Brainwashing of My Dad (narrated by Matthew Modine), which she is currently adapting into a book, tracks the disturbing and dangerous rise of right-wing media. Her documentaries focus on socio-political themes with the intent of inspiring discussion and fomenting change.

Michael Uhall received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020. He works on the ecological crisis, existential risk, posthumanism, security studies, and the history of conservatism. You can read more about his work here: https://www.michaeluhall.com/.