In what way, this issue of the ISRF Bulletin asks, may the study of objects inform our understanding of social or cultural life? What conceptual or methodological challenges arise from the study of (or with) objects? Where do material objects sit within broader structures of signification? And how do they supplement, undergird, or otherwise interact with human subjectivity? In posing these questions, this issue builds on the well-established notion that objects do not form a wholly separate and silent backdrop to human agency but are woven into it, are required for and complicit in it.
