For many of us, personal boundaries have become a daily obsession. Hyper-aware of proximity and the distance at which human breath commingles, “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 initial years of a pandemic that may well be continued into an uncertain future. How much space around an individual contains their radiant heat, germs, and pheromones—is this zone an extension of the body?

Boundaries can be physical divisions: walls, membranes, rivers, masks. They may also be manifest as cultural expectation, as lines on a map or as classifications between matter. Marking a separation on paper does not eliminate the complexity of relationships that cross between but speaks directly to sovereignty and those with the authority to define the line. Conceptualized as such, these artificial delineations control people and places through a variety of means, often violent and often non-consensual. They are not durable and they are rendered mutable over time: erected, transgressed and eroded by people, context, revolution and pandemic. And yet, boundaries exist in opposition to entropy.

Prospect, Issue #7 is a call to examine boundaries—to share experiences, political awakenings, and potent reappraisals of relationships between people, other species, and the environment. The diverse projects in this collection illustrate the breadth of this boundless topic—explorations into the corporeal and abstract expressions of boundaries. The editors hope that Prospect elicits further consideration and conversations.

COLLABORATORS:

Daniel Atha, Matthew Alvarez, Hans Baumann, Sarah Nicholls, Lois Farningham, Joel Freeman, Cecil Howell, Daniela Leija Quintanar, Meghan T. Ray, Khyati Saraf, Nancy Seaton, and Eri Yamagata.