This article explores how predictions about future nanotechnological and neuropharmaceutical applications to medicine further anti-ageing discourse in the present. Products of both research areas enable physiological augmentation, with uses way beyond accepted traditional goals of medicine. But most “nanodreams” have not come to fruition, yet; as such, much popular scientific writing about nanotechnology is “thoroughly science-fictional” in how it imagines its future. Projections about these technologies contribute to devaluing the ageing experience and neglecting the need to address challenges of ageing in the present. To make these points, this article will read two speculative texts alongside one another: a piece of creative science fiction and a predictive popular science account. Ray Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind propagates brain–computer interfaces, and Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists deals with neuropharmaceuticals. Such parallel reading risks conflating different genres, narrative forms and contexts, obfuscating the purpose and possibilities of either genre. But it helps illustrate how ideas of an augmented human species have begun structuring social belief systems that shine through creative writing that joins in pitching, rather than effectively critiquing, these technologies as holding the fountain of youth.

In light of progressive criticism of the managerial ‘expert’ logic dominant in the development field, the article analyses how international organizations (IOs) increasingly seek to pluralize their knowledge by adding to their toolkit certain territory-based elements of participatory approaches to data, especially from the Global South. It examines how such attempts to pluralize IOs’ expertise translate in practice, by focusing on the localization processes of the UN 2030 Agenda in six peripheral communities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that is, their development of territory-based targets and indicators for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. The article contrasts these local practices with UN expert agencies’ approaches to data disaggregation. This comparison shows how datafying tools and processes may vary considerably, indicating important epistemological differences in how knowledge gets validated, with impacts regarding visibility and accountability. The territory-based practices analysed defy authorized forms of knowledge by making data not only for monitoring or for action but also for caring and for making live. The article concludes that localization gives the impression that IOs’ knowledge is becoming more plural, yet these changes remain at the surface only, with other knowledges becoming parts of standardized templates and merely complementing official data.

This paper revisits the longstanding debate over the nature of suffering, focusing on the divide between subjective and objective accounts. I defend a Personalist conception of suffering, rooted in an Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing, that recognizes suffering as both universally human and deeply personal. On this view, suffering is neither a purely sentient, inner experience nor reducible to external conditions, but a disruption of flourishing that arises when love or justice is violated or absent—and that calls for a communal response. Understood through this lens, suffering, I argue, invites a shared practice of meaning-making—not as sentimental optimism but as a form of grounded hope: realistic, responsive, and attuned to the dignity of both the sufferer and those who accompany them. Even when suffering cannot be cured or fully comprehended, it can be met with deeper engagement, mutual responsibility, and a reaffirmation of our commitment to a life lived in relation and shared purpose.

Despite the social, political and personal importance of contentious death investigation, medico-legal autopsies have received scant socio-legal attention. By extending understanding of the importance of care for the dead in this context, this article begins to bridge that gap. To do this, I explore original empirical data from interviews with Anatomical Pathology Technologists who both assist during post-mortems and take responsibility for the care of the deceased’s body before and after autopsy. I argue that care is woven throughout their practice and identities. This care is enacted within a complex context of relations and regulations, such that practice can simultaneously be technically and morally ‘good’ (including actions that go beyond what is necessary or mandated). In making this argument, I both extend understandings of care to relationships with the dead, and contribute new insights into the way that coronial justice can, and should, gain legitimacy.

This article critically appraises the UK Labour government’s early approach to parental leave reform following the 2024 election, comparing pre-election promises with post-election policy directions. Drawing on Daly’s conceptualisation of care as a policy good (Daly, 2002), we analyse Labour’s reforms across three overlapping dimensions central to their pre-election pledges: access and pay levels, leave design and entitlements, and inclusion of diverse families. We argue that Labour’s current approach adheres to liberal welfare principles, with market-oriented reforms prioritising economic productivity over care provision, perpetuating implicit maternalism while systematically excluding working-class, minority ethnic, and self and precariously employed families. In contrast, care-centred approaches pioneered elsewhere in Europe demonstrate that gender equality, social inclusion, and economic productivity are mutually reinforcing rather than competing objectives. Echoing calls from the Women and Equalities Committee for transformative change, we argue that Labour’s incremental approach cannot achieve reforms that work for parents or the economy without embracing care-centred policies.

The article undertakes an original reframing of the significance of modular synthesisers by attending critically to their audiovisual presentation alongside houseplants and other signifiers of domesticity. This visual framing – all too easily dismissed as decorative superficiality – is shown to be concomitant with a domestic imaginary and concerns for portability evident in the development of early North American synthesisers. Analysis of historical artefacts and interviews identifies the importance of portability to the realisation of a domestic imaginary in early synthesiser development. The contemporary emergence and audiovisual documentation of ‘ambient machines’ as recognisable configurations of modular instruments for the automatic production of ambient music is shown to develop these concerns towards the realisation of synthesiser as domestic appliance. Through the symbolic and functional pairing of plants and synthesisers in domestic settings, the modular synthesiser comes to be associated with ideas of nurturing and care.

Social reproduction scholars have made headway in integrating the analysis of capitalism, class, gender, and care. We offer two contributions to this literature. First, we provide a novel framework with insights into companies as sites of decommodification, shaping childcare cost distribution and affecting childbearing rates. Second, we extend social reproduction research geographically to the oft-overlooked region of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is home to 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-declining populations, with low fertility as a prime cause. We argue that privatization catalyzes commodification, raising work intensity and financial-temporal uncertainty and eroding collective resources for social reproduction, thereby impacting childbearing. We explore this mechanism quantitatively by employing four distinct definitions of privatization across two datasets: one covering 52 Hungarian towns (1989–2006) and another spanning 29 postsocialist countries (1989–2012). We shed light on the details of the mechanism through a qualitative analysis of 82 life-history interviews in four Hungarian towns, surveying the lived experience of privatization.

This article conceives of the prevalence of death occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic in older people’s care homes in the United Kingdom (UK) through the lens of necrocapitalism. There is significant evidence that pre-pandemic marketisation policies have structured endemic neglect in the sector, but these generalised failures are frequently not highlighted in the debates around the causes of COVID-19 deaths. The article seeks to specify the way caring has been re-fashioned through a specific form of necrotic privatisation, resting on degrading the intensity of caring, institutionalised via market-orientated regulation. COVID-19 fatalities in older people’s services are necrocapitalist as pre-existing the pandemic the sector was defined by forms of slow violence, exacerbated during the crisis. The de-regulation and cost-saving at the heart of commodified care denigrate older people’s existence, reorienting the value of care in terms of its potential to generate profit.

In sociology, aesthetics have become an important lens for exploring the sensory dimensions of political and economic processes, with research on urban aesthetics contributing significantly to this field. However, much of this work focuses on how aesthetic forms serve the interests of political and economic elites, portraying aesthetic value as a direct product of political ideologies. While these approaches have shown that urban aesthetics are shaped by power struggles, they pay limited theoretical attention to less straightforward aspects of aesthetic politics—such as cases where clashing values, imperatives, and commitments meet. This gap is particularly pronounced in places shaped by violent histories, where the value of urban beauty might be inevitably entangled with loss, ambivalence, and co-existence with unwanted materialities. This article proposes an approach that foregrounds the dilemmas and compromises inherent in urban aesthetic politics, focusing on the varied practices through which people negotiate how to care for urban aesthetic value over time. I develop this approach through a case study of Klaipėda, Lithuania—a city shaped by layered aesthetic transformations, from state annexation to socialist modernisation to post-Soviet nation-building and Europeanisation. Using mixed-methods research, the article highlights differences in how people articulate what counts as good and bad aesthetics and which forms of material care—or neglect—are “appropriate” to sustain the city’s desirable aesthetic appeal. In doing so, the article reveals complex gradations of value underlying seemingly coherent aesthetic ideals of Europeanness.