When understood as material artifacts, digital photographs are able to do more than represent other times and other places. Their materiality creates performative possibilities of accident and agency that can be particularly useful during times of mourning. This poetic essay responds to a photograph of the author's mother that he took with his cellphone shortly after her death.

While hurricanes are weather events that may become human/ecological tragedies, they might help create stylized moments too. Hurricanes can be distinctive from each other in message and in the tools they use as their material aspects (wind speed or storm surge) interact with cities, social structures, and popular media messages. One way to explore hurricane styles is through forms of affective mapping. This exploration analyzes features of several hurricanes that made landfall in 21st-century North America in combination with considerations of affect around hurricanes. The combination of material and affective elements of hurricanes might allow rhetorical style to serve as a way of rethinking hurricanes and their connections, from the individual level to global climate change.

In this essay, I use performative writing as a framework to explore the problem of climate change. Specifically, the shifting and accumulative nature of clouds serves as a trope for imaginatively restaging environmental issues. In the essay, I view the environment as a symbolic and material construction that is coproduced in connection to the personal, discursive, and collective unconscious. Through narrative, poetry, and performance, I argue for the concept of environmental performativity as a metonym for exploring the interdependent relationship among the individual, environment, and climate change.

Written in the spirit of Maggie Nelson's “autotheory,” this essay takes up José Esteban Muñoz's notion of “ephemera as evidence” to explore how the body-as-object (i.e., the body-as-book) might reformulate understandings of materiality as an ephemerality of “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things.” Bodies-as-books are distinctly material, though not always solid, and can be written and read as artifact-ephemera that end but do not disappear.

Scholars of color in white majority universities inhabit a zone of alterity, which forces them to make strategic choices about how they perform. Tactical essentialism is an alternative to the dichotomous ideologies of static and fluid ontologies. Rather than allowing oneself to be caught in the double bind between performing whiteness and resisting white supremacy, a tactical form of essentialism recognizes that identity is fluid, yet simultaneously linked materially to lived-empirical experience. By recognizing that the dichotomy can be complementary, the tactical subject intentionally engages in performances of identity that can be leveraged to decolonize merit in the ivory tower.

This essay is drawn from the author's book, Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry , which explores the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry. The essay is a poetic meditation on being given the green light and not taking it. A meditation on permission, a meditation on warning: on the insistent green flash the performer heeds or ignores; and the invitations the client gives—there, then gone—there, then gone—there, then gone—that the therapist takes or misses. It is a meditation on hope, regret, and shame.

This essay creatively evidences the materiality of a story and its ability to migrate and evolve. It does so by critiquing the non-human limitations of binary onto-epistemologies, especially visual/discursive ones. Here stories and words have lives, bodies, and agency and as such they matter, but that matter is not material. The mattering of stories is not contingent upon human telling or hearing. Stories linger where humans disappear. An ecomaterialist reading suggests we might productively decouple storytelling (stories about us) from storied matter (stories with autonomy).

Nunalleq is a pre-contact Yup'ik village (1350–1660 CE) massacred during a centuries-long conflict known today as the Bow and Arrow Wars. As global temperatures fell during the Little Ice Age (1300–1800 CE), conflict intensified along the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta as food raids and village burnings became commonplace among warring Yup'ik communities. The following essay considers the events of Nunalleq alongside a new era of migration as Yup'ik prepare to move farther inland in response to human-induced climate change. Specifically, I reflect on the relationships between Yup'ik material culture and oral history, and how these histories adapt over time. This writing is an experimental ethnography based in archaeological excavation and participant observation. This writing is oral history. This writing should be read aloud.

A residency on the coast inspires reflections on the view. How has the shoreline “view” been compromised by private interest? What happens when the need to gaze deeply into epic nature, to get lost in the scale and beauty of the shore, is no longer accessible? How can popular forms of education push back and build environmental consciousness? If climate change is about aesthetic devastation as much as toxicity, resource depletion, and colonialism, then the shoreline offers a reflexive site through which to reconsider views of the land and to argue for democratic access.

In this essay, I demonstrate how the ecological concept of “scaling” carries potential to animate critical logics in the Anthropocene. I argue that scaling can expose unexpected linkages across space and time that help to denaturalize particular ecological formations as entangled, rather than separate. I demonstrate the critical ecological potential of scaling by performing it rhizomatically, weaving across scales of space and time while juxtaposing theoretical concepts with my experiences of life as a resident in the urban desert landscape of Phoenix, AZ. This ecology ultimately reveals how climate change acts as a complex necropolitic of the Anthropocene.

Drawing from in situ fieldwork in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, the northernmost settlement on Earth, these notes bring out the affective, ambient, and atmospheric power of extended darkness during the polar night, when the sun does not appear above the horizon for several months at a time. Each entry is composed of 113 words to reflect the number of days without light in Longyearbyen during the winter of my visit. Through a mixture of ethnographic observations, researched academic scholarship, and some endeavors of poetic worldmaking, these notes attempt to evoke the ineffable force of global warming by performing the sort of acutely observed and felt attentiveness to planetary being that is needed for our time.

Oscillating between naturalistic observations and conceptual forays, this essay simultaneously performs and introduces the notion of “composing climate change” at the heart of this special issue. Spanning personal narrative, poetry, dialogue, theoretical meditation, thick description, photographic essay, and other modes of scholarly writing, the contributors to this issue experiment with genre, style, and form as they seek to describe, evoke, grasp, disclose, and otherwise imagine what it means and—crucially—what it feels like to be an earthling in a time of tremendous ecological change and profound planetary transformation.

In this essay, the four authors explore the material and affective agency of art-making in a collective biography workshop. We work with our memories of the death of someone close to us, through stories, and through making art. Collectively we explore a specific, embodied moment of the particular deaths we have each experienced. The substantive focus of our work is methodological. We concern ourselves with what is made possible through including art-making in intra-action with the more usual storytelling/listening/writing/reading/making of collective biography.

This performative autoethnography sways between past and present, setting two towers and a flying trapeze into a “responsive dialogue” in the liminal space between waiting and weightlessness, the mirrored mediations engage in an intra-active word play that reflects the forward–back arcing rhythms of lived experience. The pas de deux of the intertwined stanzas seeks to embody on the page an iterative conversation between memory and materiality, time and form, sorrow and joy, connections missed… and connections made.

In this essay, I work with the stories and artwork generated by a small group of visual art therapists who came together in a collective biography workshop. All of the participants, including the author, specialize in end-of-life and palliative art therapy. As a collective, we worked to bring our experiences back to our bodies through stories, art-making, and writing, to explore how working with people in the last days, weeks, or months of their lives affects us. In this essay I ask: What happens when stories paint pictures, and when pictures paint stories, to make visible our experiences of death, vulnerability, and love—experiences that might otherwise have been impossible to know?

By highlighting a collaborative praxis between performative interviewing and affect theories, this essay theorizes interpretive discernment as an orientational and conceptual foundation that paves the way for performative interviewing. Interpretive discernment—the process of sensing and interpreting affective registers—encompasses both a methodological orientation and an analytical heuristic. We argue that interpretive discernment builds an interpretive architecture that expands our vocabulary, heightens our ability to listen for the affective in interviews, homes in on methodological nuances that enrich critical qualitative approaches to interviewing, and provides a structure to performative interviewing analysis.