Introduction to Kin
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This edition presents various temporal and spatial imaginations, disorientations and understandings of kin-relations. The writers approach kinship not as a fixed genealogy but as something reimagined.
Across these articles, kinship systems appear dislocated from the private household and the biological line. It surfaces in the networks migrant workers sustain across borders, carrying home with them as something portable rather than fixed, and in the person to person care that fills the gap where state and family infrastructure fail. It surfaces, too, in the etymologies that trouble our inherited categories — the slippage between family, kin, and kith, the last of these reaching past bloodline into friendship, land, and the more-than-human. It’s felt in the generational teachings between First Nations women to their kin of country and culture, and more transiently in friendship itself, treated here not as a lesser attachment but as a fully realised network, held together by memory, ritual, and repeated small acts of contact.
What unites these works is a denial to let kinship be condensed to inheritance. Each insists, in its own register, that relation is something made rather than given — contingent, laborious, and of immeasurable value.
The notion of kinship prompts us to imagine the present and the future differently, to envision a world in which solidarity, interdependence and other forms of intimate association and belonging coexist. Kinship's endurance lies less in its structures than in its constant, unfinished practice.
For this edition of fine print we welcome contributors Jemi Gale, Allison Gibbs, Hugh Magnus, Jonno Revanche, and Adam Sudewo with others joining the conversation over the coming weeks.
- Rayleen Forester for fine print