​​A swan. A door. A wound. A map. Contours mark the outlines of perception and understanding, where meaning is emergent and shifting, pieced together out of the mundane, the fragmentary, the relational. This is the space between what is felt and what is known – an emotional edge, a memory that resists articulation, the shape that is made by the white space on a page, an imprint, a residue. Contours trace lines of connection and imagination, where boundaries push up against open space. Contours draw attention to the tension between enclosure and movement, constraint and possibility.

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As Kathleen Stewart wrote about affect, the contours in many of the contributions to this issue emerge from ‘a slowed ethnographic practice attuned to the forms and forces unfolding in scenes and encounters’. In Fulya Pınar’s poem, ‘the line starts here, but it moves’, migrant life in Turkey takes shape in queues, bureaucratic lists, a child humming a tune whose words are unsung. The literal lines that the poem follows form a space that holds both ordinary violence and tenderness. 

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The graphic piece by Sandra W Rodríguez Castañeda, ‘Do you remember that girl?’ follows rumour and rural roads in Peru to track down the story of a teenager, Judith, who died from a self-induced miscarriage while en route to a clinic. Its final image overlays a stark map of travel over the evocative scene of Judith enjoying pineapples in the field on her last afternoon, tracing what moves and what or who does not.

 

In ‘The light between strangers’, a poem that embraces white space and breathing room, Fiona Murphy is invested in a new vocabulary that arises to bridge gaps of difference and distance. She explores the contours of the word ‘sonder’, ‘the sudden realisation that every stranger you pass has a life as layered, bruised, tender,/ and thunderous as your own.’

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In her poem ‘Future boxes’, Anna Gustaffson evokes the mundane yet surreal sense of bureaucratic disembodiment and containment in digital strategies for healthcare programmes. ‘One woman floats in a blurred background./ She sits nowhere’, the speaker of the poem says. ‘I mute my microphone./ Take a bite so no one hears.’

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In Dilshanie Perera’s ethnographic story ‘How the world actually works’, cyclones, land boundaries, and whispered stories mark the fragile edge between what can be held and what slips away. We come to understand how one woman’s patient and continued cultivation of soil that no longer belongs to her or her family allows her to create a space of belonging despite the injustice of dispossession.