Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge: Issue 41 (2026)
Contributors
Sara Ghazi Asadollahi is a visual artist, a PhD candidate (ABD) in Moving Image Studies at Georgia State University’s School of Film, Media & Theatre, and the managing editor of In Media Res journal. Her research explores abstraction in fiction films, with a primary focus on Robert Bresson’s works, though not exclusively.
Kyler Chittick is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and a Graduate Principal Instructor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. His research engages queer theory and critical sexuality studies at the intersections of law, cultural studies, film and media, and contemporary political theory. His academic work has appeared in Alberta Law Review, Porn Studies, Senses of Cinema, and Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies. He has also written for Inside Higher Ed, Syndicate, and the Rainbow Story Hub (RSH) website. As co-director of RSH—an Edmonton-based non-profit that uplifts the city’s queer history through online storytelling and community programming—Kyler contributes as a public historian and serves on the City of Edmonton’s Sexual & Gender Diversity Archives Advisory Committee.
Ashley Good is a Canadian author, cultural theorist, and artist whose work explores the intersections of nostalgia, digital culture, and late-stage capitalism. A former indie filmmaker and current essayist, her writing often examines how aesthetics, memory, and technology shape contemporary identity. Good is the author of the young adult novels Mary & the Aliens and Just Add Water, and her cultural criticism appears on her Substack, Musings of an Indie D Lister. Her research situates emerging internet phenomena like vaporwave within broader philosophical and sociocultural frameworks, revealing how irony, decay, and longing inform the digital age’s collective psyche.
David R. Gruber is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work bridges rhetorical theory, continental philosophy, science studies, and body studies. He is co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Language and Science, co-editor of the forthcoming volume Rhetoric After Identification, the author of Brain Art and Neuroscience, and the book reviews editor for the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Shahira Hathout holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Trent University, Canada, and is currently a visiting scholar in the Centre for Feminist Research at York University. Dr. Hathout has published in journals like Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, New Perspectives, Philosophy and Literature, among others, and is currently working on a book project, exploring biopolitics from a new materialist perspective.
John Hawkins is a PhD candidate in philosophy at both Sophia University in Bulgaria, and the University of New England in Australia. He is also a Master of Science degree candidate at the University of San Diego. He has written about the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) for The Conversation, and recently published a paper in the peer-reviewed Nanoethics journal.
Niels Wilde Langballe is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University. He is currently working on a project entitled “Horcruxology II: Objects of Future Pasts and Prenatal Life.” He is the author of Isotopography: Kierkegaard’s Topological Realism (2024).
Natasha Lushetich is Professor of Art, Media & Theory at the University of Dundee, UK, Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded ENERGY: A Philosophy of Practice (2023-2027), and Co-Director of the Leverhulme Doctoral Programme in Regenerative Innovation regenr8-I (2024-2029). Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on global art, critical media, complexity, performativity and datafication. Her books include Fluxus: The Practice of Non-Duality (Rodopi 2014); Interdisciplinary Performance (Palgrave 2016); The Aesthetics of Necropolitics (Rowman and Littlefield 2018); Beyond Mind (De Gruyter 2019); Big Data: A New Medium? (Routledge 2020); Distributed Perception: Resonances and Axiologies (Routledge 2021; co-edited with I. Campbell); Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies (Rowman and Littlefield 2022; co-edited with I. Campbell and D. Smith), Indeterminacy after AI, Leonardo (MIT Press 2023); and Probability and Agency, a special issue of Parallax (Taylor and Francis 2023, co-edited with I. Campbell).
David PontilleDavid Pontille is senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), member of the Center for the Sociology of Innovation in Paris. His research topics include writing practices in different workplaces, and the politics of maintenance in urban settings. In close collaboration with Jérôme Denis, he has published several articles about graffiti removal and The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance (Polity Press, 2025). He is also the co-founder of Scriptopolis, a collective scientific blog about writing practices.
Jacob Potash’s work has appeared in Hobart and Blind Field. He co-founded the production company Fair Form, and his latest feature film, The Philosophy of Dress, was completed in 2025.
Craig J. Saper’s most recent book on Auteur-Publishers: Small Press Practices as Avant-Garde Writing (December 2025) has a chapter on Something Else Press that would have benefited from Nicole Woods’ 2026 book reviewed in this issue. Saper’s recent co-edited and extensively annotated and introduced Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (2021) would have benefited from Woods’ discussion of Knowles’ staccato cadences, book-objects activated by reader-viewers, and the computational poetry that looks both back to the historical avant-garde’s reading machines and to the future of conceptual and computational writing and publishing experiments.
Thomas B. is an independent writer and cultural theorist whose work explores the intersections of aesthetics, technology, and symbolic form. His essays have appeared in Rhizomes and Heavy Feather. He lives in Thailand.