For many of us, personal boundaries have become a daily obsession. Hyperaware of proximity and the distance at which human breath comingles, “You are standing too close to me” might be thought or spoken even as we dwell on the sustained physical absence of friends and co-workers over the past 12 months.
Boundaries can be physical divisions: walls, membranes, rivers, masks. They may also be manifest as cultural expectation, as abstract lines on a map or as classifications between matter. Conceptualized as such, these artificial delineations control people and places through a variety of means, often violent and often nonconsensual. And yet, boundaries exist in opposition to entropy. They are not durable and they are rendered mutable over time: erected, transgressed and eroded by people, context, revolution and pandemic.
Prospect, Issue #7 is a call to examine boundaries. To share experiences, collective relationships, political awakenings and potent reappraisals of how we relate to the concepts, people and places outside ourselves. We hope this call elicits inspiration for a boundless topic that has political and personal resonance.
—Hans Baumann joins Nancy Seaton as co-editor while Marie Warsh (co-editor of the last 6 issues) takes a leave of absence.
