FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts

Isabel Schueler (Editor-in-Chief) & Alisha Palmer (Deputy Editor)

The cover image of this issue depicts a spider’s web, an apt metaphor for the irreducible complexities of the family as both an experiential site and an object of study. Visually, the interconnected threads of the spider’s web evoke the intimate and often complex connections within the family. Moreover, the dualities of the web – a naturally occurring object and simultaneously one that is carefully, purposefully constructed in addition to its dual functions as a home, a habitation with connotations of stability and safety, and a trap, a mechanism of enclosure and violence – speaks to the central problems of the family.

The family, as an ostensibly biological group has been naturalised as the fundamental unit of collective organisation. The family as a natural phenomenon, as theorists and historians have demonstrated time and again, is belied by its historical and geographical contingency. Queer theory in particular has emphasised that the family is a socio-culturally produced form. Foundational texts like Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenologyinvites us to “consider the family as an artificial social group” and to explore the objects, logics, institutions and technologies through which the family has been reproduced and naturalised (73). As feminist and queer theorists have endeavoured to show, the family is neither innocent nor immutable. Protecting certain kinds of familial structures has long provided the justification for the ongoing legal regulation of sex, gender, marriage and reproduction, making the family a contentious site for non-normative subjects. In 2025, the protection of certain kinds of families at the expense of others has fuelled transphobic legislation, the re-criminalisation of abortion, attacks on Palestinians, and the forced separation, incarceration, and deportation of immigrants.

On the other hand, the family has proven to be a productive site for imagining new forms of care and ethical responsibility. From the queer (and not always human) networks of affiliation in the Queer Ecologiesanthology to the capacious and resistant family-making practices of Sadiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, the family continues to inspire the examination, critique, and reworking of both social organisation and academic method. It is these complexities that have caused scholars the world over, and now us, to ask: in the context of continued abuses conducted in the name of family against families, how do we engage with ‘the family’? This intractability threads web-like through the nine articles that comprise this 36^thissue of FORUM. It is also picked up poetically and reflectively by our two guest contributors Carl Alexandersson and Siân MacGregor.

-- 

Many, many thanks to the following people for their excellent work in reviewing and editing this issue:

Chun Sui 'Christopher' Chan, Olivia Fischer, Mariane Gallet, Avani Udgaonkar, Alice Eaves, Alyssa Chua, Ariana Sutherland, Dara Carr, Erin Symons, Hao Yu Hu, Katherine Arrington, Morgan Connor, Neeti Kapoor, Sarah Vickery, Sara Yahya Hamed, Yi Song, and Zoe Robertson. 

Thanks as well to the rest of our PGR colleagues and the LLC Postgraduate Research Office.