While writing this, my last editorial, it appears as if attempts to erect impassable frontiers have only intensified, apparent everywhere from the resurgence of violence in Israel–Palestine, to the continued deaths of asylum seekers at sea, to the vaccine nationalism that leads wealthy countries to stockpile medical supplies. Despite human efforts to delineate neat boundaries in this way, the natural world does not seem to agree – regions collapse, disease spreads globally, the ocean is on fire, the body of baby Artin Iran-Nejad washes onto a Norwegian shore, the remains of one Kurdish-Iranian family's attempt to reach the UK from France. Against a backdrop of geopolitical and ecological upheaval, we currently find ourselves in a time when the careers of theatre and performance artists have been destroyed in the fallout of COVID-19;when the academic job market is bleak;when performing arts programmes and departments are threatened with closure;and when, as in the UK, the value of an arts and humanities education is systematically undermined by the government, capitalizing on the fallout of the pandemic to fuel corporate ambitions kindled decades ago. Ana Elena Puga's ‘The Caravana of Central American Mothers in Mexico: Performances of Devotional and Saintly Motherhood on a Transnational Stage-in-Motion’ demonstrates how the caravans function as a kind of moving theatrical stage, which challenge the image of mothers as passively suffering, by showing them as active citizens of change where successive governments have failed.
Editorial: Ritual Unions