Mycelial matters: fungal epistemics and the birth of the new materialisms

This article traces how mycelial-thinking grabbed the attention of the contemporary new materialists. Tracing moments of contact, lines of change and adaptation, and the birth of ‘mushroom fever’ in new materialisms, the article does not afford its readers a linear approach or chronological ‘history of the mushroom in new materialism’. Rather, entanglements of mycelial matters, the limitations of modernist epistemologies, and the rise of new technologies in the present are fictioned as key parts of a new ontological approach to what matter is in a complex age , how new materialists aim to understand it, and what that means for epistemological discourses in the twenty-first century. The article combines the multiple histories, associated practices, artworks and stories of fungi to show how new materialisms have been spored by mushroom-thinking—a phenomenon that is forever unfolding, growing, changing, and and and …. At stake are issues of justice and justice-mattering and how fungal epistemics and writing practices aim to address these, cutting together-apart critiques of anthropocenic metaphor, flattened ontologies and mycelial–digital divides, and decolonizing the field of futures-thinking with non-Northern Western encounters with mycelium.