Inheriting the family: emotions, identities and things

This introduction to the special issue ‘Inheriting the family: emotions, identities and things’ briefly explores how attention to different forms of inheritance as emotional practices offers new ways to understand ‘intergenerational emotion’. It explains the importance of new methodologies to interrogating this emotion and introduces a range of possibilities that are taken further by the contributors in the issue. These include analysis of emotional concepts, object-oriented investigations, particularly as parts of interviews and ethnographies, postmemorial creative practices and researcher self-reflexivity, notably in relation to family history research.