With and without things: an introduction

This theme issue deals with contemporary dispositions towards conserving or discarding objects at home. It investigates practices of sorting and divesting through an ethnographic approach. In a cross-cultural and cross-generational fashion, we illustrate the contemporary editing of domestic materiality and the social implications of re-accommodating things elsewhere. This means examining the spatialities of storage and how the decisions to get rid are taken. Also reconsidering the significance of the preposition ‘with’, which indicates responsibility, relation and use, as much as a potential separation, refusal or constrain.