UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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Vascular Memory
Full text linkThese images are part of a larger project that explores multispecies relations in city space; how we humans can, and do, and must practice shifting our attention in acknowledgment of the others with whom we share land and our homes. For me, this shift in attention necessitates a kind of deeply reflective practice—deliberate and performative at first, but soon an embodied memory.Using macro photography, these pieces reflect one way of attending to a different scale and tempo of multispecies life. Here, I attune visually to the Catalpa leaf: a non-native tree transplanted to Toronto, for ornamental purposes. Importantly, attuning to the Catalpa leaf also shifts my conception of time and futurity. The present future is no longer solely anthropocentric but, rather, planthropocentric as well.We hold stories and memories in the tissues of our bodies, and these fleshy materials that compose us also create the patterns of our sensing and doing. Our tissues are sources of knowledge and of retention, and how they re-act tends to inform how we are able to relate. I believe this to be true of human-animals, and I believe it to be true of plants. If our bodies are capable of carrying so much experience and expression, what then might other multispecies bodies be capable of holding onto? What patterns or stories might other tissues retain or carry into the composition of the future
unspoken poems for a passed lover
Full text linkThis selection of poetry is grounded in personal memory, written for a former lover but never shared with the intended before they died. These love poems are informed by a posthuman perspective that looks at relationships between human beings and the more-than-human world drawing on assemblage theory, environmental temporalities, and a metaphorical new materialism
Dragonfly: After Elizabeth Povinelli's Geontologies
No full textThis prose poem explores autobiography as a trace site for the affective encounters between life and non-life. Using my own memories of making a childhood bug collection, I attempt to answer a question Povinelli asks in Geontologies—What does life desire? —by merging it with a question raised in my own ethnographic fieldwork—What do I desire? The affective resonance between my childhood bug collection, my ethnographic fieldwork as part of my PhD program in anthropology, and Povinelli’s 2016 book disrupts linear notions of time and argues that desire for difference itself produces the distinction between life and non-life.
Original PublicationBrunson, Wesley. “Dragonfly.” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 47, no. 1, 2022, pp. 235–239.
© 2022 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/anhu.12372
Unsettling the Homestead
Full text linkUnsettling the Homestead is a reflection on an art exhibit by the same name, showcased at Crossroads Gallery in April 2017. The exhibit investigated settler histories of the Stewiacke Valley by weaving personal stories, ancestral memories, and Indigenous histories into a multi-media installation. Unsettling the Homestead invited visitors to a recreated East Coast kitchen to step into the history of one settler family’s farm on the land known as Sipekne’katik, Mi’kma’ki. Often, settler genealogy is void of the histories of displacement and violence against Indigenous nations. This exhibit aimed to unsettle notions of the homestead by investigating and critiquing the personal positions within these narratives. By utilizing modern multi-media and traditional English art forms, Unsettling the Homestead braided stories and experiences from multiple generations to critique our ideas of what it means to clear land, homestead, and settle
Ruminations on a “fisherman’s path”: Land as palimpsest
No full textThis piece looks at the layered history of a “fisherman’s [sic] path” that traverses my property in Grey County and makes its way to the Saugeen River. I am exploring the idea of land as (historical) palimpsest. My sources are: David Gibson’s surveyor field notes (1848); an archaeological report about a “point” (ancient spearhead) found along the river (1984); and my own recollections of the path and its environs. I am explore how different ‘periods’ and ‘peoples’ collide and layer and erupt as the land surrounding the “fisherman’s path” goes through natural and “man-made” changes. A temporal linearity of history gets jumbled and reassembled in interesting ways