The pandemic has changed the meaning of both touch and tech. It has drawn a line across occupations, work processes, and industries. It is a specific moment where production is separated not into the production of services and goods, but ones that are touch-based and tech-based.

In a piece focused on time and its infrastructural entanglements, Zannah Matson examines how the promise of infrastructure structures our relationship to the future, and thinks alongside the unfinished and interrupted forms that infrastructures often take.

Since March 2020, COVID rates have decimated Marshall Islander communities in the US, while the US nuclear testing and longstanding military presence in the Marshall Islands created the conditions for this public health ‘crisis.’ This essay explores how discourses of islands as remote and races as discrete undergird US imperial practices that produce Marshall Islanders’ health and legal vulnerabilities. The COVID pandemic both reveals and deepens uneven topographies of exposure, risk, vulnerability, and abandonment across US empire.

Renewed uprising against the death-making apparatus of police and prison demands that we attend to the relationship between property and personhood, specifically to how the theft of land is facilitated by the theft of life. This essay focuses on the propertization of the gendered subject in the making of whiteness and reminds us that abolition requires the undoing of such gender-property logics.

The saga of hydroxychloroquine illuminated how the basis for building and upholding a hyper-individualised and nationalistic common good requires the disposal and sacrifice of Black, Indigenous, brown, disabled and minoritized people.

As palm oil travels from oil, to seed, to market, this controversial substance becomes associated with moral notions of ‘purity’. We take a multi-temporal and multi-scalar approach to understanding this process: examining current and historical literatures on economic botany and lipid chemistry, we unfold the tactics by which these palms and their oils are purified, and identify how these are reproduced in current marketing trends. Purity, this reveals, is a dream. Though this dream is unattainable, it has shaped plants and their oils, human bodies, and ecosystems, all the while masking the troubling consequences of its doing so.