This special issue, 'Cartographies and Constellations of Posthuman Futures', is a collaboration with Amalia Calderón & J. Bernardo Couto Soares. It is kindly supported by NICA, Netherland School for Cultural Analysis, and OSL, Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies. Contributions should be emailed to submissions@soapboxjournal.net by July 5th.

Wild Things is dedicated to the memory of José Esteban Muñoz (Queer Theorist and Performance Studies scholar) who, together with Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o (African-American Studies and Performance Studies scholar), was also working on the concept of wildness as a concept with the potential to relieve queerness of some of its exhaustive critical and conceptual work.

A year ago, we singled out contamination as the common thread traversing the events, conversations, and research unfolding within our networks. At the time, contamination had not yet embedded itself into our thoughts and actions as a virus overwriting all else. There is not only a conceptual need but a physical inevitability to re-configure the meaning and effects of ‘contamination’.

In the UK, public attention has recently been drawn to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, also known as the Police Crackdown Bill. It is the latest evidence of the authoritarian nature of the country’s current Conservative government, and is part of long running efforts by the state to silence dissent and marginalised voices from public discourse.