Threshold 48: Kin, “Get-together” Launch Party

On May 7, editors and contributors of "Thresholds 48: Kin" hosted a webcast get-together to celebrate the launch of the latest issue of Thresholds Journal. As intimate relations with others have become a source of both vitality and risk, the pieces in Kin gain new readings, not only as we seek impossible answers to our current situation, but as we imagine how the COVID-19 crisis' residue might alter our future. Thresholds is the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by MIT Architecture and distributed by the MIT Press. Each independently themed issue features content from leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of architecture, art, and culture. Thresholds 48: Kin is edited by Stratton Coffman (MIT M.Arch '20), Dalma Földesi (MIT M.Arch '20), and Sarah Wagner (MIT M.Arch '20). Designed by Laura Huaranga, the issue features work by Aga Khan Professor Nasser Rabbat and a number of MIT alumni, including Tijana Vujosevic, Nana Last, Emily Watlington, Irene Brisson, and Malcolm Rio.

Thresholds 48: Kin takes on the address of the “other” as a project for scholarship, as a thickening of the plot, as an antidote to a hygienics of the term “kin”—to signal salvation from ecological and social downfalls, untethered from materialist analysis or the care of ethnographic work. The issue extends a hand towards other disciplines, as a nudge for greater dimension, to paint the roominess that some circulating accounts of kinship tend to constrict in service of maintaining bloodlines and other allegories. Kin challenges the disciplines of art and architecture to consider the transforming social relations that are deeply entangled with spatial practice. Thresholds is an annual, peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture and distributed by MIT Press. Each independently themed issue features content from leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of architecture, art, and culture.