Containment

Containers are ubiquitous and inescapable. From handbags to houses, barrels to databases, captivating gameworlds to the “bag of stars” that Ursula Le Guin calls the universe, containers furnish infrastructures for living and action while extending our capacities for managing things across space and time. They not only give shape to our lifeworlds: they form and transform our bodies and being.

The chapters in Containment: Technologies of Holding, Filtering, Leaking traverse technologies, bodies, ontologies and imaginaries, reflecting on what different container technologies, containment strategies, and container metaphors tell us about ourselves and how we relate to our worlds. With common reference to Zoë Sofia’s (2000) foundational essay on container technologies, contributors draw on media and cultural studies, social history, architecture, and postdualistic approaches in philosophy and social science to explore liminalities of containment both as and beyond holding.