From the Editors
Dearest readers,
Thank you for joining us at our newborn website, for taking the time to read, for pausing to think with us and our collaborators. To introduce our first published pieces—the inaugural publications of our inaugural issue—we’d like to take this chance to briefly introduce ourselves, Upstream, and what we’re all about.1
Upstream is a porous and mutable publishing collective, a group of experiments and an experiment as a group. We start, lovingly, from where we are: Lenapehoking, so-called Philadelphia, a city built on layered ground, buried streams, and ongoing displacement. We reach out from our here to your there.2 We operate as an invitation, a moment of pause in which to notice, question, and map the dynamic ecologies between people, the built environment, and our nonhuman relatives.3 In other words, we are interested in tending to all our relations,4 and to the politics and poetics of relation. 5
A relation is not simply a connection between isolated points. Rather, it is a composition made up of possibilities, tensions, power struggles, limits, gradients, and debris gathering in the eddies of encounter.6 We value destratified, non-hierarchical modes of thinking7 that transform the limits of the Insider-Outsider binary,8 and that are interested in how histories of inequality and access, harm and repair, proximity and distance situate our interactions.
Our inaugural issue, Source, undoes conventional ideas of beginnings. When framed as a single point of origin, “source” reinforces colonial narratives of purity and linear progression.9 Instead, we invited contributors to reflect on the sedimented, nonlinear paths that lead us here.10 11 We asked: how can we reimagine “source” as an ongoing, interconnected process rather than a single point of origin? And what are the possibilities, tensions, or limits of this reimagination?
The works emerging from this theme move through uranium and asphalt, stolen artifacts and ancestral seeds, collaborative language and landscape choreography, questioning what it means to locate or lose a beginning:
Kelvin Vu's “TMITBD” is a landscape choreographic performance about Three Mile Island, where the 1979 nuclear meltdown remains “the most studied nuclear accident in history” yet continues to generate unanswered questions about radiation's effects on bodies and ecologies. The piece combines movement, sound, and animation to explore meaning-making in the face of crisis, archival gaps, and the simultaneity of too much and too little information.
Miriam Saperstein's “Incantational Contaminations” examines how demon bowls, amulets buried in ancient Babylonian doorways as protective technologies, were extracted to fuel the expansion of the University of Pennsylvania and similar projects across the so-called US.
Hannah Jo King's “Without Origins, We are Sacred” traces interconnected genealogies of Black family and native Tobacco through ancestral channeling, interview, storytelling, ritual, and Black feminist scholarship.
Zoe Morrison's “On the Ground” is an essay on asphalt, tracing its material origins and histories from ancient building material to modern-day petro-chemical extraction landscapes.
Maya Björnson and Liam CU's “Where the Ghost Cloud Meets the Lake” engages poetry-writing as an alchemical process, where two discrete voices transmutate through the “push-pass foldlooping of language.” Using the Manoa Method—a futures visioning tool—they take seed-words (stem, foam, deference, salmon) and bloom language around them through radial wheel structures, revealing how sources multiply and comingle.
We will be publishing pieces online on subsequent full moons, which will eventually make their way into print. For now, we invite you to pause for a moment with our intrepid contributors on their voyages through source. And, if you like what you see, consider pitching us an idea, getting involved, signing up for our mailing list, or finding us on antisocial media to see what comes next.12
Swim on, fishes,
The Upstream Editors 13
1. And we are, we’d like to humbly brag, a bona fide “we,” made up of many persons phasing in and out, fading away with a wave, ghosting, hanging on for dear life, resolutely showing up.
2. Ilya says, “upstream is not a place on its own–it exists only in relation to where you are.” Upstream implies both direction and motion: a gathering and a carrying across time. You can go upstream, but only because you previously defined its location.
3.
Chris Cornelius, “This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives,” (Untapped Journal, 2023).
4.
Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (South End Press, 1999).
5. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (University of Michigan Press, 1997).
6. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2021).
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
8. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “Outside In Inside Out” in When the Moon Waxes Red (Routledge, 1991).
9. These colonial narratives are co-constituted through processes such as Indigenous dispossession, slavery, racial capitalism, and patriarchy. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Sylvia Wynter (2003), Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015).
10. Ebbs and flows of momentum archived in Google Docs and WhatsApp messages. Half-baked thoughts and trailing tangents exchanged over pizza, pie, and often tea—exchanges of the values, desires, and vocabularies each of us have amassed.
11.
Since launching our call in December 2024, we've worked with over 15 contributors to develop these pieces, hosting workshops in April 2025 where we collaboratively reviewed work and created collective drawings and poems from the source material itself.
12.
Readers will notice the footnotes scattered throughout Upstream. We partake in footnoting as a citational practice that engages conversations that came before us and the ongoing conversations we are a part of. See Katherine McKittrick (2021) and Max Liboiron (2021).