Deadline: July 10, 2026
Contact: Alba Tomasula y Garcia
Email: aatomasu@olemiss.edu

Call for Papers: Edited Volume
Mycelia across Media: Creative Expression and the Fungal Turn
In the 2020s, mushrooms are having a moment: in the face of ubiquitous crisis in recent years, fungi have moved from the peripheries of scientific and cultural consciousness to the center of interdisciplinary inquiry. As researchers across the natural sciences, human medicine, bioengineering, construction, and textile industries have illuminated fungi’s ecological adaptability, sustainability, biochemical capacities, and technological promise, scholars and research networks in disciplines such as anthropology and cultural theory have begun to explore the philosophical and conceptual implications of fungal life. Crucially, these developments are deeply intertwined with the realm of creative expression: the narratives surrounding fungal life that we encounter in literature, art, and film are imbricated within them, shaped by emergent scientific, technological, and cultural understandings of fungal life, and shaping them in turn. This edited volume, therefore, seeks to expand upon the growing body of fungal research by focusing on the fungus in creative expression: what we can learn by focusing on fungi in literature, art, film, and other media across a variety of global contexts. In examining what fungi become and signify within stories, images, performances, and aesthetic forms, we foreground storytelling across media, histories, and cultures as a crucial site of meaning-making, condensing and probing broader assumptions about the more-than-human world, subjecthood, or the (in-)stability of ordering systems. By tracing these narrative formations, we ask how cultural imagination participates in the emergence of contemporary fungal futures.

Over the last decade, a plethora of cultural productions that focus on mushrooms has appeared: documentaries such as Fantastic Fungi (2019) or The Mushroom Speaks (2021) advocate for the remedial, transformative, and connective potentials of fungi in times of crisis; in Anna Tsing’s seminal anthropological book, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), the matsutake becomes a symbol for the possibility of life in (post-)capitalist ruins and an impetus for collaborative survival (see Tsing 2), while Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds shows how fungi “throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster” (n.p.). At the same time, works like the game and television series The Last of Us, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, or Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic evoke fantasies of fungal infection colonizing human minds and bodies, staging fungi (and their spores) as uncanny agents of dissolution, parasitism, and grotesquely violent death. As the divergent contemporary discourses surrounding them (ranging from fascination with mycelial intelligence to anxieties around pathogenicity) demonstrate, fungi function as highly volatile cultural symbols whose meanings shift across contexts, genres, and historical moments. By examining the diverse narratives, representations, and artistic deployments of fungi, this volume aims to illuminate how creative works have shaped, and continue to shape, understandings of interdependence, relationality, precarity, multispecies life, and the possibilities and limits of more-than-human thought in their engagement with fungal life.

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 ca. 400 words, accompanied by a short (250 words) bibliography to

Mina Kaneko (imkaneko@ncsu.edu)
Alba Tomasula y Garcia (aatomasu@olemiss.edu)
Anna-Maria Senuysal: (senuysams@gmail.com)

by July 10, 2026. Authors will receive notification of acceptance by July 30, 2026. Final articles are due January 15, 2027. We are seeking to publish the volume with a North American University Press in early 2028.

Posted on June 3, 2026