Mycelia across Media: Creative Expression and the Fungal Turn
Due Date: 07-10-2026
In the face of ubiquitous crisis in the twenty-first century, fungi have moved from the peripheries of scientific and cultural consciousness to the center of interdisciplinary inquiry. Crucially, these developments are deeply intertwined with the realm of creative expression. This edited volume seeks to expand upon the growing body of fungal research by focusing on fungi in literature, art, film, and other media. We invite contributions that investigate how fungal life forms circulate, transform, or trouble cultural assumptions within different global and historical contexts; what literature and the arts reveal about fungi; and what fungi reveal about literature and the arts. We explicitly invite chapters that foreground non-Western traditions, Indigenous and postcolonial perspectives, unexpected archives, and experimental methodologies. Topics might include:
- Fungi as figures of precarity, survival, parasitism, symbiosis, or collective flourishing
- Fungal aesthetics in global literature, cinema, animation, performance, or digital media
- Mycelial metaphors for networks, world-building, and alternative kinship structures
- Fungi within colonial, postcolonial, or decolonial ecologies
- Contamination, decay, and rot as cultural forms
- Indigenous mycologies and cosmologies
- Queer, crip, or feminist engagements with fungal life
- Fungal futurisms, science fiction, and speculative ecosystems
- The cultural imagination of pandemics, spores, and airborne life and contagion
- Mushroom labor, foraging cultures, and extractive economies
- Fungal art practices: bio-art, installation, fermentation, sculptural decay
- Sensory reorientations: touch, smell, texture, and the aesthetics of decomposition
- Mushrooms as medicine and drug; politics of consumption
- Mushrooms and fungi in food studies
Please send abstracts of 400 words, accompanied by a 250-word bibliography to:
Mina Kaneko (imkaneko@ncsu.edu)
Alba Tomasula y Garcia (aatomasu@olemiss.edu)
Anna-Maria Senuysal (senuysams@gmail.com)
The deadline for abstract submissions is 10 July 2026. Authors will receive notification of acceptance by 30 July. Final articles are due 15 January 2027. We are seeking to publish the volume with a North American university press in early 2028.