This essay explains how Junot Díaz’s stories show the lasting impact of colonialism and dictatorship on everyday life, especially for immigrants and their children living between cultures. I argue that struggles over belonging, love, and identity are shaped by history and power even when characters do not name those forces directly. I interpret Junot Díaz’s fiction as an account of “the other side”: a peripheral perspective produced by migration, racialization, and the enduring afterlife of colonial violence. Dominican and U.S. histories, especially dictatorship, imperial entanglements, and postindustrial economic restructuring, shape the motives, relationships, and moral horizons of Díaz’s characters. Methodologically, the essay combines close reading with interdisciplinary framing: using diaspora theory to parse displacement, decolonial theory (via the concept of coloniality) to track the persistence of power/knowledge hierarchies, and comparative literary analysis to set Díaz alongside Gloria Anzaldúa and Rudolfo Anaya. Díaz’s “third place,” language, and genre play (fabulism, fantasy/science fiction) render colonial history as lived structure. Díaz shows how coloniality distorts intimacy, masculinity, and community through both material constraint and epistemic domination, and that “decolonial love” names a fragile but real form of resistance and healing. I conclude that colonialism is first a material enterprise whose cultural residues persist, and that reading the “carnality of knowledge” in Díaz clarifies how agency can emerge, even in exile, as a world-making practice.

This paper examines the dynamics of religious transformation in North Africa during the second and third centuries AD, challenging traditional narratives rooted in culture-historical models and simplistic cultural labels, such as the purported ‘Africanisation’ of cults under the Severan dynasty. While past scholarship has often framed these changes in terms of cultural permanence, resistance, or renaissance, this study shows that they are instead deeply embedded within the broader social and economic practices of the Roman Empire and, at the same time, reflect local and micro-regional dynamics. The paper adopts a multifold approach to reinterpretation: the onomastic attributes of gods and devotees; the iconography and materiality of divine representations; the architectural forms of temples and their functions. By reanalysing key material corpora, this contribution highlights how cultic patterns were shaped by factors such as economic networks, the proliferation of stone-made monuments, and the involvement of an expanding ‘middle-class’ base of worshippers. A specific focus is placed on the cult of Saturn, often viewed as emblematic of African religious identity or continuity. This study argues instead that the second–third century boom in Saturn worship reflects broader imperial trends, including the rise in monumentalisation and shifting patterns of religious patronage. By dismantling previous assumptions and employing relational and materiality-focused methodologies, the paper offers a revised framework for understanding the interplay between local traditions and imperial dynamics in shaping religious practices in Roman Africa.

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.

Within the rich literature on volunteering, the topic of volunteer–user interaction and the mechanisms causing or mitigating inequality in this interaction remain understudied. Moreover, knowledge on how digitalization affects voluntary interaction is scarce. Based on a qualitative study of a Danish organization that offers virtual voluntary tutoring, this paper shows how technological and formal aspects of the organizational context may mitigate the risk of volunteers engaging in paternalistic, intimacy-seeking behaviour. First, reliance on information and communications technology (ICT) and managerial logics sustains a bounded form of interaction in which solving a problem is the focal point, while access to personal background information is limited. Second, the organizational design suspends sociability as a criterion for differential treatment of users. Third, anonymous mediated interaction enables temporal and audio–visual asymmetry, allowing users to perform ‘digitally sustained impression management’.

Grandparenthood is widely understood as a valued identity in later life, associated with treasured grandparent–grandchild relationships. Although scholars highlight the importance of mutuality and bidirectional flows in these relationships, there is a need for qualitative research exploring grandparents’ experiences of receiving care from their grandchildren. Material goods and services are often bound up with practices of intergenerational care, although this has rarely been the focus of research on grandparent–grandchild relationships. Informed by theories of care and consumption practices, and in-depth interviews, this article addresses two questions: how did grandparents experience receiving care from grandchildren during the pandemic, and how were consumption practices bound up with those experiences? Participants described experiencing various kinds of care from grandchildren (toddlers to young adults), suggesting that they experienced grandchildren’s care – and caring consumption practices – as autonomous or embedded within parental caring practices. Both types of care appeared to foster grandparental wellbeing, by highlighting that grandparents matter to younger generations: even small acts of care were experienced in this way. This was a particularly powerful message during the pandemic, when many older people felt physically and emotionally vulnerable and othered by media discourse about their expendability. Beyond offering further insights into the experiences of older people during the pandemic, these findings contribute to understanding of intergenerational care between grandparents and grandchildren. They demonstrate how the complex and multi-directional circulation of care within families is bound up with material practices, and how experiencing even small acts of care from grandchildren can foster grandparents’ wellbeing.

Archaeologists have long identified quarries as a ubiquitous part of the landscape in which precolonial Maya populations built their world. Yet, it is only recently that scholars have begun to move away from viewing these quarries simply as places where stones were extracted to recognizing them as important nodes in the social, political, and cultural fabric of the Maya Lowlands. The four articles in this Special Section discuss some of the most recent insights into the lives of those who intimately worked with limestone, inhabited the cratered landscapes created by its extraction, and crafted their worlds through the relationships forged and maintained in the practices of quarrying, processing, and utilizing this material. In this introductory paper, we set the scene by reviewing previous research and outlining the main approaches involved in the documentation, analysis, and interpretation of Maya limestone quarries and production loci. We continue with a discussion of the relevance of quarry investigations for the general study of precolonial Maya societies. We conclude with a brief overview of current methodological trends, followed by a look ahead to the ways in which researchers could take such investigations forward and integrate them into future research agendas.

This article considers people’s relations with ruins in the Mesoamerican past from the perspective of two approaches within the ontological turn. The first examines ruins drawing on Indigenous ontologies, while the second involves the application of a new materialist perspective that incorporates Peircean semiotics. Both approaches view matter as animate and share a relational, nonbinary, and nonessentializing position. Research drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of Native American perspectives considers ruins as living entities often inhabited by divinities, ancestors, or pre-Sunrise beings, which could require propitiation and reverence or provoke denigration and erasure. A new materialist perspective allows archaeologists to better recognize what ruins did beyond holding meanings imposed on them by people. Ruins in ancient Mesoamerica had the vibrancy and power to gather people, offerings, shrines, and the dead in ways that constituted community and temporality, contested or legitimated authority, and invoked the cosmic creation.