This article explores the dynamic relationship formed with a collection of infant clothes against the backdrop of experiences related to foetal loss and infertility. Expanding on existing research that examines the tangibility of objects as affective devices and tools that allow for emotional expression, autoethnography-as-method is employed to examine the role that clothes played in the negotiation of the post-miscarriage experience. This article is situated within the sociology of hope and bereavement to expand research concerned with the capacity of material objects to evoke feelings of hope. In the case examined here, infant clothing existed as a precarious ‘presence’ that signified the mourned infant. But beyond representing bereavement and loss solely , the research shows that these objects held capacity to inspire hope beyond the immediate bereavement. In this sense, these items of clothing fulfilled a function as ‘hopeful’ objects. A theorisation of hopeful objects is offered in this article. It argues that hopeful objects are physical sources (items to touch, cradle or smell, for example) of inspiration to persevere in moments of uncertainty. Objects become hopeful in their potential for an aspiration beyond immediate grief and bereavement. Further, hopeful objects are generative in their ability to inspire and orient towards a future. Commencing with the exploration of the author’s first-hand experiences of miscarriage, an analysis of infant clothes is provided across the following stages: (1) objects acquired to demarcate a major life moment, (2) liminal objects that signified an attendant loss and (3) objects that evolved to signal more hopeful futures.
The contemporary social sciences are seeing a resurgence of interest in social class, prompted by widening economic inequalities. While much research associated with this resurgence remains true to the core maxims of class analysis, it has yet to fully grapple with contemporary transformations in class structure. In advanced economies such as Australia, the combined effects of wage stagnation and asset price inflation, supported by pro-asset owner policy regimes, have made asset ownership increasingly central to life chances. In this article, we explore whether the rise in asset-based inequalities is effecting a change in subjective social class identities. We ask: who identifies as working or middle class? And, have the determinants of social class identification changed over time? To investigate these questions, we analyse the series of Australian Election Study surveys fielded from 1987 to 2022, focusing on the period since 2001. By examining change in the determinants of social class identity over time, we show that homeownership has become an increasingly important factor shaping identification with the middle class, while renters are becoming more likely to identify as working class. While asset ownership has become increasingly important for class identities, the impact of more traditional indicators of class, including education and supervisory roles at work, has weakened over time. This article therefore demonstrates how asset ownership is transforming social class identities.
LGBTQ+ community archives have multiplied across Latin America in the last few decades. Bringing together people from different identities, ages and social trajectories, these archives have worked to disrupt normative historical narratives and to interrogate how to pass embodied experience to new generations. Drawing on ethnographic archival research in Argentine LGBTQ+ community archives, this article examines how, through practices of collection, classification and display, LGBTQ+ people built kin across generations. The article introduces the concept of archival kinship to analyse how kin is enacted and made through practices of archiving, connecting people through memory work mediated by documents and objects. As a concept, archival kinship is used to make legible how kin acts as a force of erasure; as an articulator of collections, mediating what gets archived and remembered; and as mutuality of being, a practice through which people co-constitute one another through shared objects, documents and memories. The concept contributes to sociological studies of kinship that move beyond hierarchies of legitimacy that prioritise biological ties to make legible other meaningful relationships such as chosen families and friendships, and shows the role of material culture in kin formation.
This article offers a collaborative autoethnographic exploration of the embodied entanglements researchers experience when studying medical cosmetic procedures. We focus on affective entanglements of self and environment – here characterised as flesh and field – especially during fieldwork. Our methodological intervention comprises analyses of conversations between researchers, reflections on fieldwork and autoethnography. We demonstrate how researchers – far from being ‘neutral’ observers in the field – are implicated in a pervasive cosmetic gaze. Using reflexive thematic analysis of written autobiographical stories and follow-up conversations, we explore three interconnected themes: cycles of aesthetic reflection and (dis)engagement, the discursive moral dynamics of aesthetic judgement, and the collapse of distance between researcher and subject. These themes emphasise the recursive and emotional aspects of cosmetic fieldwork, where the line between professional critique and personal embodiment is continually negotiated. We argue that corporeal experiences in the field inevitably complicate the ideological dimensions of these procedures, raising methodological and epistemological questions about the limits of ‘critical distance’ in knowledge creation. As an alternative to this critical distance, we highlight the value of situated, embodied perspectives in producing scholarship around cosmetic cultures, gender, ageing and the body, while simultaneously considering how to ‘care’ for the body in spaces saturated with aesthetic judgement. Through this, we contribute to broader conversations about reflexivity, embodiment and knowledge production in contemporary sociocultural research on medical cosmetic procedures.
When innocent blood is spilled in the Iranian world, mourning does not remain private. It becomes loud, collective and excessive, unfolding as a shared public outcry of grief, anger and refusal. This article argues that, in this context, mourning rituals are collective practices through which the testimony of the dead is made publicly present and sustained, preventing unjust death from receding into private loss or historical closure. Situated within an Iranian sociopolitical world where authority is evaluated through its relation to justice, these practices expose injustice and unsettle the legitimacy of authority. Guided by a decolonial framework, the article departs from readings that reduce Iranian experiences to geopolitics and ideology. Instead, it grounds its analysis in a sociocultural world where injustice is already known, named and publicly contested. I trace this structure across four ruptures, moments in which the injustice of authority becomes publicly visible: the epic of Siyāvash, the ritual mourning of Muharram, and two contemporary moments: the death of Jina Mahsa Amini and the January 2026 massacre. Drawing on lived and relational knowledge, historical narratives, ritual practices, poetry and publicly circulating materials, the article shows how collective mourning operates as decolonial witnessing by carrying the testimony of the dead across time. In doing so, mourning becomes not only a form of public protest but also an act of collective judgement that unsettles the legitimacy of authority.
