Emergence Magazine Podcast Emergence Magazine

Interrogating where AI models originate from and who they serve, writer, artist, and technologist James Bridle questions our fundamental assumptions about intelligence in this expansive interview. Acknowledging the correlation between our narrow definition of intelligence and what our technologies look like, they wonder how an embrace of the unknowable and the unpredictable in our technology might in fact allow us to widen our thinking beyond the humancentric and step deeper into the mystery and intelligence of the living world.
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In one of our favorite stories, “Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System,” Potawatomi mother, scientist, and professor Robin Wall Kimmerer takes us through the nine-thousand-year existence of maize, reflecting on the ancient circle of reciprocity that links humans and corn and what has been severed in this once deeply sacred relationship. With an eye to the unsustainable industrial practices—GMOs, monoculture, use of toxic fertilizers—that continue to dominate the landscape of agriculture, Robin invites us to reconnect with the age-old teachings and kinships, held within plants, that are waiting to be remembered.
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In this narrated essay, Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood bring her into an emerging realization of her own mammalhood. When she encounters her animal self, deeply embedded in the ecosystems around her, it transforms everything: her sense of home and safety; what it means to feel, to act, to care through the ancient, feral knowledge of instinct. Listening for teachings from the Earth, Kerri feels her way through the anguish and tenderness of raising a child in a burning and breaking—and beautiful—world.
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How do our inheritances shape our lives? In this week’s narrated essay, Afro-Taína author Jamie Figueroa brings her pen to the erased and fragmented pages of her family’s history, exploring writing as a tool of revelation and reclamation amid a legacy of assimilation into white colonialist culture. As she works to uncover the inherited wounds of her ancestors housed in her own bodily cells, she also reaches for a deeper remembering—writing her way into the landscapes and the cultural memories that bring together pieces of her identity.
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This week, we share a short story by Mexican author Laia Jufresa, translated by Sophie Hughes, that imagines the chaos of a world ravaged and divided by climate change. In “Be Dammed,” thousands of climate refugees find themselves forming settlements on boats as they wait endlessly to cross a heavily guarded border in pursuit of safety. One woman, tasked with holding prayers for their salvation, negotiates the entanglement of faith and politics as she considers who, or what, truly has the power to change their circumstances.
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What can we learn from imprints in the earth about the ancient presences that left them behind? Acclaimed author Anna Badkhen traces markers left in the earth from the near and distant past, from the buffalo wallows of North America to the treasure-hiding game sekretiki she played as a child, from the histories held in whale earwax to the map of our human becoming in the Bouri Peninsula of modern-day Ethiopia. Reading each of these imprints as a kind of porthole—a window into memory, with all the retellings and reinterpretations characteristic of our messy, continual search for meaning—Anna wonders what lineage of impressions we might leave for the future.
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Learn more about our upcoming immersive exhibition in London this December. Reserve your free tickets to SHIFTING LANDSCAPES.
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