Natural Metaphors for Network Gathering: Technologies of Meeting at the Allied Media Conference

In this article, I explore how nature metaphors are used within communities related to the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. The AMC celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2018, and took place annually in Detroit for twelve years leading up to that milestone (Allied Media Projects 2022b). Beyond AMC’s commitment to Detroit, the conference offers a compelling set of case studies for considering dialogue between intentional praxis of gathering and important issues related to environmental racism, popular education, and science fiction. AMC is designed to explore methods of building and sustaining within media-based organizing, while the conference itself models practices of building and sustaining within its own network. Primarily focused on adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy (2017) and the mobile multimodal art installation Beware of the Dandelions (2015–2016) from the collective Complex Movements, this paper argues that AMC uniquely weaves components together that create the conditions for studying organizational process through understandings of the natural world.