Soapbox : contamination

For this issue of Soapbox, we invited young researchers to critically engage with the notion of contamination, and more specifically how the concept travels over neat categories, harbouring the potential of undoing borders, stimulating even ‘dead’ matter with velocity, and bounding together supposedly insular beings. This means attending to relationality and difference, on every scale, from molecular frictions to planetary movements. Along this line, contamination is about the in-betweenness, the liminality of the ‘ish’, the ‘not quite this or that’–the process found in such entanglements.