This ninth SDUK broadsheet openly engages the nineteenth-century society from which the series takes its name, by considering DIFFUSING: how circulation, dissemination, opacity, transparency, and anonymity shape the way knowledges, materials, and media are transferred. Whereas the original Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge circulated its publications through largely one-way and top-down means, contributors to this issue explore knowledge-sharing as a more open, non-hierarchical practice.
One might be prompted by physical processes of diffusion to wonder: How does matter move through bodies, across borders, and into inter-relations? Sophia Jaworski and Zoë Wool offer a reappraisal of the 1979 train derailment known as the “Mississauga miracle,” analyzing how toxic waste moves, where it gets warehoused, and how risk and contamination are normalized in late industrial societies. Forms of water circulation animate two contributions: artist Katherine Ball shares the schema for a functional DIY filtration system; and Liz Howard’s poem conjures water-witching and surface tension—liquid metaphors that bespeak interconnectedness.
Shifting from causes to effects, some might ask: How is diffusion shaped by the media it traverses? In contributions by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Xaviera Simmons, geography and language co-constitute artistic interventions. In Simmons’ artist project, the car-centric landscapes of the American southwest serve as the backdrop for probing questions and proclamations on settler colonialism, slavery, plunder, and reparations. For Simpson, whose lyrics for the album Theory of Ice are reproduced here in full, song is a potent medium through which land, memory, sorrow, and Anishinaabe resurgence are carried.
Some readers might wonder how speed and hyper-visibility in digital media are influencing new strategies for knowledge-sharing. In a roundtable conversation led by Nehal El-Hadi, Mark V. Campbell, Elicser Elliott, and Charles Officer discuss how they navigate relationships to hegemonic white institutions as Black artists and scholars. Similarly, anonymity is consciously employed in an artist project by Immony Mèn and Lilian Leung for Public Visualization Lab, who use face-tracking technology against the grain to archive experiences of anti-Asian racism.
Educators, artists, and activists might ask: How are collaborative practices shifting the ways knowledge circulates? Look to the cumulative and layered work-in-progress of the Neurocultures Collective, whose research probes the intersections of cinema and neurodiversity. For other insight into ongoing initiatives, a new iteration of the SDUK’s Local Useful Knowledge section by Joy Xiang examines activist networks that are questioning and remaking urban spaces throughout the GTHA, often in response to the differential impacts of COVID-19.
Those who gravitate toward wide-scope geographic or historical context may wonder: How do ideas circulate across struggles, across continents, across generations? In the first column of a three-part series, Jacob Wren addresses the legacies and lineages that scaffold his work, considering how the force of writing can extend and recompose political action, while Irmgard Emmelhainz employs speculative, critical, and poetic modes in a three-part long essay linking decolonization struggles in Mexico and Canada.
This issue concludes with a glossary, which expands, connects, and clarifies terms used in the issue. See the complete Glossary section—which spans all SDUK issues and other programs to date—and browse this issue digitally for additional content, including songs from Simpson’s Theory of Ice.