“Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others.” (Tsing 20)

“…staying alive—for every species—requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.” (Tsing 28)

“Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes—the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons—and the elusive autumn aroma.” (Tsing 282)

Magdalena Górska and Eva Svedmark both use their work to investigate vulnerability as conditions of both the object of one’s research, and oneself as researcher. They both evoke a kind of boundary anxiety: Górska uses breathing as a revelation of the co-constitutive nature of body and environment, and the tenuous, permeable membrane between inner and outer political, emotional, material realities; Svedmark, meanwhile, unravels diffractive emotional entanglements of participating in online cultures, squirming in the ethically fraught position of researching vulnerable populations engaged in precarious activities.

Anna Tsing recognizes the combination of ambivalence, aspiration, disenfranchisement, and potential violence that circumscribes the precariously lived experiences of the mushroomers and mushrooms she encounters; yet, this understanding leads her to call for collaboration. How do we collaborate with each other as scholars when the systems of development, evaluation, and remuneration do not understand or support or comprehend undisciplined collaboration? How can we better teach and support vulnerable collaborative practice in classrooms that acknowledge the differential nature of precarity, while encouraging the flourishing of capacious ideas and practices?

How do we keep each other company, and how does our scholarship make us good companions? How do we acknowledge/accept/embrace contamination as perhaps a kind of non-competitive proliferation and non-voluntary vulnerability?