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Despite significant work on family geographies in recent years, geographers have paid less attention to changes and challenges that may be considered 'family troubles' in diverse contexts. Through this editorial and the special section, we unpack time-space dynamics of 'family troubles' in diverse contexts, with a particular focus on care and relationality. Our discussion foregrounds ambiguities and tensions surrounding geographical proximity and propinguity, material-emotional responses, and diverse meanings of 'family', 'home' and belonging in the context of troubling changes in family lives, intergenerational relations and practices of care. We seek to establish an agenda for future geographical work and interdisciplinary dialogue on 'family troubles', vulnerabilities and social suffering in contexts of (troubling) changes and diversity. Such analyses are crucial in our efforts to envision a more relational understanding of our 'being-in-the-world', underpinned by care ethics and support for differentially positioned family members throughout the lifecourse and across generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore contested meanings around care and relationality through the under-explored case of caring after death, throwing the relational significance of 'bodies' into sharp relief. While the dominant social imaginary and forms of knowledge pro-duction in many affluent western societies take death to signify an absolute loss of the other in the demise of their physical body, important implications follow from recog-nising that embodied relational experience can continue after death. Drawing on a model of embodied relational care encompassing a 'me', a 'you' and an 'us', we argue that after death 'me' and 'us' remain (though changed) while crucial dimensions of 'you' persist too. In unravelling the binary divide between living and dead bodies, other related dichotomies of mind/body, self/other, internal/external, and nature/ social are also called into question, extending debates concerning relationality and openness between living bodies. Through an exploration of autobiographical accounts and empirical research, we argue that embodied relationality expresses how connectedness is lived out after death in material practices and felt experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]