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Contribution short abstract

This poster explores Brown’s original concept of the ‘chimynthropic assemblage’, which traces the posthuman political ecologies emerging from the entanglements of fungicides, resistant fungi, and England’s agro-industrial systems.

Contribution long abstract

Antifungal-resistant fungi are a window into the complexities of the chemical anthropocene. Resistant fungi are strange, beautiful and disquieting – at once creating and resisting an agricultural system built on agrochemical reliance. This poster explores Brown’s original concept of the ‘chimynthropic assemblage’, which traces the posthuman political ecologies emerging from the entanglements of fungicides, resistant fungi, and England’s agro-industrial systems. Alongside analysing how fungicide resistance is conceptualised by agricultural stakeholders across industry dynamics and values, the chimynthropic assemblage foregrounds fungi as agents whose responses to chemical saturation reveal the limits of anthropocentrism. Attending to fungi’s adaptive strategies makes visible the more-than-human dynamics shaping agricultural futures, while illuminating the ethical, ecological and political stakes of ignoring them. Indeed, responding to POLLEN 2026’s call, this poster argues that listening to fungal resistance opens a space for counter-hegemonic agricultural narratives, with possibilities for reorienting agriculture toward resilience and care. This poster represents part of a PhD thesis in progress, and draws from interviews with English farmers, agronomists, policy-makers, regulatory advisors, agrochemical employees, and mycologists, alongside multispecies ethnographic fieldwork undertaken on a biodynamic farm. The images included on this poster are sketches taken at the fieldwork site, as part of a multispecies methodological approach that uses illustration to think through more-than-human encounters.