layla zbinden

Slow Death and Labored Breath: Listening To, Listening Through Inheritance

• Read the Issue: https://aaww.org/portfolio/i-want-sky/
  • I Want Sky collects prose, poems, and hybrid work celebrating Egyptian activist Sarah Hegazy, and the lives of all LGBTQ+ Arabs and people of the SWANA region and its diaspora.
    
    Published in a special partnership with Mizna, the notebook was made available as a print issue in the fall of 2021, including pieces exclusive to that format. I Want Sky is guest-edited by Mariam Bazeed, with George Abraham serving as poetry editor.
    
• Read My Essay: https://aaww.org/slow-death-and-labored-breath-listening-to-listening-through-inheritance/
  • The better half of her four decades of life were marked by the ebbs and flows of relapse and remission, either sick, or about to be. Remission is life with an asterisk; conditional.

Mitochondrial Agency: Toward’s a Host/Guest Theory of Co-Immunity

• Read the Issue From Bacteria to Gaia: Levels of Biological Agency: https://www.spontaneousgenerations.com/issue11
  • Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the notion of biological agency in the history and philosophy of science and STS. Though the very idea of agency as a biological concept has been and remains highly controversial, philosophers and practicing biologists are now seeing the organism as an agent—conceived of as an entity that pursues goals, actively regulates its own development, and shapes its environment…
• Read My Article: https://www.spontaneousgenerations.com/zbinden
  • Abstract: The ways we conceptualize the immune system and its relationship to the body impacts not only the ways we conceptualize illnesses, both acute and chronic, but the ways we treat said illnesses and the ways we understand the ontology of illness and disease. This essay surveys the anti-imperialist feminist discourse on immunology and medicine in relation to illnesses, immunity, liberal humanism, and posthumanism. I center the role of mitochondria in both immune responses, immune dysregulation, and autoimmunity and cancers, as well as the material inheritance and lineages of mitochondria to posit chronic illness in the bodies of women as collective phenomena passed through mitochondrial ancestry and stored in the bodily archive of the colonized body. I explore what can be gleaned from illness if we take seriously our grandmothers, mothers, and our mitochondria as agents of history, who exist long before we are even conceived, and what it could mean for us to be their guests.