A #PresentingACCUTE Interview

With the upcoming 2025 ACCUTE Conference at George Brown College from 30th May- June 2nd, we have been having an interview series of #PresentingACCUTE which focuses on some of the presenters in conversation with Gladwell Pamba, ACCUTE’s Coordination and Communications Assistant. Next up on the series is Dr. Krista Collier-Jarvis (Mi’kmaw; nek’m/she/her) who is a PhD Candidate at Dalhousie and an Assistant Professor at MSVU. Her doctoral research is an Indigenous informed approach to contagion and climate change called the “rhizombie.” She recently published “Uncanny Play,” and “A Micmac Memoir,” was longlisted for a CBC non-fiction literary prize.

Tell us a little bit about what you’ll be focusing on in your presentation.

My presentation, entitled “…of the Dead: The Rhizombie and Monstrous Mycelium in American Zombie Narratives,” details the central concept from my recently completed doctoral work on climate/contagion/racial entanglements as well as the manner in which I apply it to zombie video games, such as The Last of Us. My term for these entanglements—“rhizombie”—argues for a shift away from cause and effect approaches whereby contagion always becomes a more immediate threat and overlays any attempts at addressing other issues. Instead, I argue that contagion exacerbates and is exacerbated by these other issues, such as climate change, in more rhizomatic ways. To support this idea, I look to how zombie video games take up ecophobia but also how the player, as an extension of the video game, becomes entangled within the game world in myriad ways.

How did you come to work on this or where did this work come from?

There are a number of things that influence this work, including my Indigenous background and my inability to compartmentalize climate change, contagion, and racialized oppression. Somehow, when I tried to focus on just one of these issues, the others kept creeping in, so I stopped ignoring them. And, there was this dirty, abject, discarded mask that caught my attention one day during lockdown when I stood in a socially distanced line outside the Superstore, awaiting my turn to enter. I kept thinking how we so readily forgot about the environment in our scramble to control contagion, but this, to me, was such a redundant approach. Research, in this manner, can serve to quiet the hauntings inside our minds.

What have you been reading or watching lately that you can recommend to your ACCUTE colleagues?

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. It’s a collection of stories by a variety of Indigenous authors, and it attends to lived Indigenous experiences as well as traditional Indigenous stories that are considered “dark fiction,” bordering on the horror-esque. Honestly, every story has kept me on the edge of my seat, and in many of them, I’m terrified for the characters.

What do you love to do when you’re not researching, teaching, or studying literature?

Paddleboarding is the thing that quiets my mind. There’s nothing like being in the middle of a lake where the chatter from the shoreline is torn away by the breeze or taking the ocean waves head on and then finding yourself in a secluded cove where the water is crystal clear. I’m also a circus instructor and performer, and I enjoy spending my weekends with my husband, two dogs, and three cats.