The School of Social Work and Social Policy is delighted to announce the publication of Small Worlds: Theorising Human Material and Environmental Legacies, a new book by Professor Virpi Marianna Timonen and co-authors, published as part of Cambridge University Press's Elements series.
Small Worlds examines how people approach material and environmental legacy-making — the ways individuals make sense of what they leave behind and to whom, and how they negotiate the boundaries of who or what counts as a legitimate recipient of a legacy. The book brings together several years of conceptual development, building on earlier published work, and lays important theoretical groundwork for Professor Timonen's current ERC Advanced Grant project, a four-site study of legacy-making in Gothenburg, Turin, Seoul, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
The book is published via Gold Open Access, meaning it is freely available to read online without a subscription or paywall.
Speaking about the publication, Professor Timonen said:
"Small Worlds has been several years in the making, and it's exciting to see it published — especially in a form that anyone, anywhere, can read for free. It gave me the space to work through ideas about legacy-making that I've been developing for a while, and it now forms part of the foundation for the further conceptual and empirical work my team and I are doing as part of the ERC project. I'm grateful to Cambridge University Press for their care in bringing it to publication, and to the ERC for the funding that underpins the wider research programme."
Read the book:
Small Worlds
Short summary:
This book introduces the concept of legacy-making: future-oriented actions and ideation concerning the material and environmental effects that humans leave behind with reference to their eventual demise. Interviews conducted in Italy, Sweden, South Korea, and the United States are drawn upon to illuminate material-environmental relationalities and entanglements constructed through everyday legacy-making practices. Material and environmental legacies are made by people within the small worlds of their environments and kinship structures, yet they are also connected to the small world of shared global practices and processes that engender the biggest challenges of our time: socio-economic inequalities, environmental degradation, and climate change. 
Citation:  Timonen V, Bäckman M, Previtali F, Yi-Neumann F, Shin Y-K. (2026) Small Worlds: Theorising Human Material and Environmental Legacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.