Science | 49.2

2026

Science

Welcome to the Science issue of Room Magazine, where we privilege questions: questions about how to construct better worlds; questions about how to destroy hyper-capitalistic, necropolitical systems; questions that beget questions and new questions.

Science has always been, to me, a double-edged sword. Here, wonder, experimentation, and new and ancestral knowledge is gained by “[observing] the territories we live in over extremely long periods of time, try[ing] different things, observ[ing] what happens, and mak[ing] changes based on those effects,” as Dr. Amy Cardinal Christianson says in Kailee Wakeman’s interview. But science can also be used to justify oppression, where “inequity is not a flaw in the system but the system itself, functioning as designed,” as Maya Namatovu’s opening poem notes. The tensions between prescriptive and descriptive science are enumerated by Abeer Esber’s haunting short story, where the protagonist notes that “I wrote it because it happened.”

Science is a way of looking differently. As our BackRoom interviewee Mining Injustice Solidarity Network notes, “we have been really focused on challenging this assumption [that mining is the solution to climate change].” In our commissioned story, Premee Mohamed’s protagonist fights to make apparent to funders what’s already clear to her about the importance of research that’s not capitalistically, or martially, viable.

Thank you so much to the Growing Room Collective, for supporting throughout this issue’s creation, and especially to issue 49.2’s wonderful team: assistant editor Kailee Wakeman and shadow Anna Lee-Popham. The enthusiasm, adaptability, and know-how they brought to bear throughout this process was in the very best spirit of what science can be, and I was and remain so grateful to learn from and alongside them.

I hope this issue makes you curious and furious, leads to 2 a.m. Wikipedia rabbit holes, fulfills urges to seek out knowledge-keepers. Quickly or slowly, dive in: -ologies of all varieties await you.

—Chimedum Ohaegbu