The Wandering Naturalist:
What’s Love Got To Do With It - Cultural Biases in Science
Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian talks with us about how cultural biases impact how we study things like symbiotes. We discuss how the tools of science help us understand the world until they become dogmatic, and how to avoid those pitfalls in science.
Listen to this episode here.
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Patricia Kaishian, a mycologist, writer, and educator who gestures to mycology as a queer discipline. Situated as a queer member of Armenian diaspora, Patricia threads connections between the often misunderstood and mis/under-represented displacement of mycelial bodes and her own. Offering a glimpse of the complex, fascinating, taxonomy-defying world of fungi, Patricia invokes reflections on how we can learn from, dream with, and reclaim queer existence with our fungal kin.What stories of diversity, fluidity, and resilience do they sporulate? What lessons can they inspire in an age of ecological collapse? And what narratives can they invite us to decompose and re-birth?
Listen to this episode here.
Green Dreamer:
Lessons from Fungi as Queer Companions
Science Friday:
How Fungi Are Breaking The Binary:
A Queer Approach To Ecology
An interdisciplinary group of scientists, researchers, and artists are using queerness as a lens to better understand the natural world, too. It’s a burgeoning field called queer ecology, which aims to break down binaries and question our assumptions of the natural world based on heterosexuality.
Listen to the Science Friday segment here.
Wild Ways of Being With Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
In this conversation, we dive into mycology as a queer discipline: what do our fungi friends teach us about entanglement and interdependence in a more-than-human world? How can we, like fungi, reclaim land, bodies, and nutrients, and rebirth into the world through decomposition?
Listen to this conversation with Tammy Gan [Advaya] here.
'The Last Of Us' Hands Fungi The Spotlight The Last of Us, a new TV show from HBO, has had audiences hooked from the very first episode. The sci-fi show and the video game it's based on tells the story of people trying to survive a mass fungal outbreak: one that turns ordinary people into murderous, mind-controlled monsters. The fungus in the story, Cordyceps, is a real one. It's known to take over the minds of insects like ants, moths, and beetles and control them to advance its own survival, but that doesn't happen with humans. Dr. Patty Kaishian, mycologist and visiting professor of biology at Bard College, joins Ira to talk about the science behind The Last of Us. They dig into what's real, what's fiction, and how fungi shape our lives.
Listen to the segment here.
Science Friday:
’The Last Of Us’ Hands Fungi The Spotlight
In this conversation with advaya, Dr. Patricia Kaishian discusses biodiversity and colonialism; extinction and regrowth; evolution and pleasure; and wild ways of knowing. She shares from her lived experience as a member of the Armenian diaspora, and from her wisdom gained from being a trained scientist. This conversation was held ahead of the upcoming course Rewilding Mythology, of which Dr. Patricia Kaishian is a part: find out more here: https://www.rewilding-mythology.com/.
Click here for the full conversation.
DR. PATRICIA KAISHIAN: The End of Species Lines, Post-apocalypses, & Interrogating Evolution Theory
Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness: Are Mushrooms Truly Magic?
Jonathan long saw mushrooms as an ingredient to avoid on a menu—until they learned that mushrooms, and fungi more generally, have a lot to do with queerness. In this week’s “Pride In Nature” episode, Dr. Patty Kaishian joins Jonathan to discuss fungi behavior and reproduction, her groundbreaking work on queer mycology, and how changing our relationships with fungi can change the world.
For the Wild: Dr. PATRICIA KAISHIAN on Queer Mycology /262
How might a mushroom challenge global control? In this episode, Dr. Patricia Kaishian encourages us to think of mycology as a revolutionary and political practice. Diving into queer mycology, we see the ways that fungi challenge binaries of gender, family structure, and even traditional biological classification. Queer theory teaches us that difference is necessary and fluidity is vital. Queer mycology shows us this applies to the more-than-human. Fungi do not make easy subjects of capitalism. In the tradition of queer theory, how might we learn from fungi rather than being threatened by their binary and definition-defying presence?
Queers at the End of the World: Queer Mycology
Mycologist Patty Kaishian and writer/educator Hasmik Djoulakian join Nina and Nat to talk about mushrooms as metaphors and creatures, non binary fungi, and the queer discipline of mycology. We talk the New Moon Mycology Summit, and the naming of the biological world. During the episode, Hasmik speaks about the violence against Armenians in Artsakh, and recommends several activist organizations where folks can learn more and offer support. These are Kooyrigs, https://kooyrigs.org/ and All for Armenia https://allforarmenia.org/
Welcome to the Mushroom Hour: Queendom Fungi - Mycology as a Queer Discipline (feat. Dr. Patricia Kaishian)
Today on Mushroom Hour we are joined by freethinker, activist and mycologist Dr. Patricia Kaishian. Kaishian received a B.A in Biology with a concentration in Environmental Studies in 2013 from Wheaton College, MA. In August 2020, she defended her Ph.D. in Forest Pathology & Mycology from SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry. She is broadly trained in the taxonomy of macro and micro fungi, with considerable field experience in the Neotropics.