Call for Special Issue Papers

Deadline for Submission 15 August 2023

Guest Editors: Katie Barclay, University of Adelaide, Ashley Barnwell, University of Melbourne, Joanne Begiato, Oxford Brookes University, Tanya Evans, Macquarie University and Laura King, University of Leeds

Background to the call:

It is only recently that scholars have begun to ask why people hold onto particular objects or intangible inheritances, like stories, while discarding others, or to consider what shapes their decisions to relegate something to an attic or retrieve it again. Such questions are critical, however, since our cultural heritage, social position, and national memory are frequently products of family inheritance. The letters, diaries, and account books that fill archives, the artworks displayed on gallery walls, and the objects curated in museums often exist only because a family deemed them to be an important inheritance that should be maintained and, eventually, vested in our national institutions. Similarly, families funded many of the statues, monuments, and buildings that mark notable people and events, seeking simultaneously to remember their ancestors and sustain their own fame and lineage as a national inheritance. These practices have profound social and political impacts that are yet to be fully theorised and explored across the allied fields of sociology and history of emotions.

This special issue proposes that using emotion as an analytical tool to explain and interpret these behaviours offers new ways to comparatively investigate the relationship between familial inheritances, especially objects, and national heritage. We now call for papers drawing on new methodologies from the sociology of emotions that help elucidate how and why family inheritances from a range of social, racial, and ethnic groups maintain their cultural power as they move across generations and from the private to the public spheres.

Scholars of memory identify how family can frame engagements with the past and the production of collective memory, particuarly in relation to the world wars and social conflict. [1] The public’s ever-expanding interest in genealogy, family history, and genetics is of interest to sociologists and heritage studies.2] Sociologists have examined the role of ‘passing on’ as a key mode of identity and kinship production, and historians of the family have explored intangible and material inheritances as alternative sources for interpreting family life and behaviours.[3] While all acknowledge the role of emotions in explaining their subjects, our special issue seeks to coalesce and advance the nascent field of research developing at their intersection, by applying theories and methods relating to the sociology of emotion to familial inheritances, enabling us to understand better why, when, and how people retain and discard their legacies, and how these relate to personal, familial, racial, ethnic, and national identities.[4] This in turn will illuminate how far emotional engagements (or lack thereof) with family inheritances determine which types of family acquisitions have the capacity to extend into the public sphere and shape national identity and heritage.

The issue aims to:

• Further our understanding of why certain items and ideas are transmitted across generations and others are not;
• Establish when family inheritances become significant to collective and national identities and heritages;
• Evaluate which methodologies and approaches from the sociology of emotion might help us explain processes of familial inheritance and nation-making.

We now call for papers that contribute to this issue, particuarly welcoming those that provide global perspectives or novel theoretical and methodological insights.

Information for contributors

We aim to publish ~8 high quality research articles (max 8,00 words).

If you are interested in this call, please submit an extended abstract (around 500 words) no later than 15 August 2023 to katie.barclay@adelaide.edu.au

We will inform authors by late August whether we would like them to submit a full paper.

Please see our instructions for authors for more information on the article submission process.

Key dates and deadlines