Enemy Essences

A collection of glass beakers are arranged in front of a mirror, on dark glass shelves

Pod-Head: Laura McLauchlan

“What might it be to consume the essence of the enemy?”

In this pod we are going to play around with the idea of enemy essences. Which are our greatest, most stuck enemy relationships? What might it be to consume something of the essence of this enemy, a microdose of a core value of the opposition (an inoculation? a homeopathic dose, for those who are believers?) Or perhaps we can don some vibrant enemy drag? Or distill a perfume of the essence of the other? Or something else entirely… This experiment is not a call to dissolve our boundaries; our no must still be always honoured. But, when things are stuck, what crafts of metabolising might we call on? How might we learn these crafts together?

Laura McLauchlan

A smiling person is half-hidden behind a large houseplant, looking at a dog who is looking at the camera.

Laura McLauchlan is a sociocultural anthropologist based at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her work focuses on connection across difference, including the limits of such openness, within environmental and social movements. With expertise in feminist more-than-human ethnography, as well as training in relational neurobiological approaches, her work attends to the interplay of material, biological and cultural aspects of how, when, and why we open to one another. She is currently a Visiting Princeton Scholar studying somatic approaches to anti-racist education as part of a larger John Templeton Foundation funded project. She was awarded the 2022 Australian Anthropological Society Postdoctoral Fellowship for her manuscript with MIT Press, Hedgehogs, Killing and Kindness: The Contradictions of Care in Conservation Practice, which has now been released and is available open access. Her forthcoming book with ANU Press, Dregs: Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand is a collection of illustrated short ethnographic fiction exploring the generative monstrous feminine. In a different life she might have been a perfumer.