This article adds to the literature on ethics in digital research by problematizing simple understandings of what constitutes “publicly available data,” thereby complicating common “consent waiver” approaches. Based on our recent study of representations of family life on Instagram, a platform with a distinct visual premise, we discuss the ethical challenges we encountered and our practices for moving forward. We ground this in Lauren Berlant’s concept of “intimate publics” to conceptualize the different understandings of “publics” that appear to be at play. We make the case for a more reflexive approach to social media research ethics that builds on the socio-techno-ethical affordances of the platform to address difficult questions about how to determine social media users’ diverse, and sometimes contradictory, understandings of what is “public.”

This article uses Rob Nixon’s theory of ‘slow violence’ to examine how families keep secrets to manage stigma over time. In an age driven by hurriedness and distraction, Nixon calls for scholars to attend to the uneventful injustices that slip beneath the radar, dismissed or postponed. While his concept addresses environmental pollution, I argue that it is also relevant to the temporal dimensions of other sociological problems. To understand the social causes and impacts of family secrets I apply the concept of slow violence to qualitative survey responses collected from non-professional family historians in 2016. Bringing Nixon’s idea to family secrets, I argue, exposes how stigma – as an often unseen and accretive form of social violence – is felt and managed within families across generations. The article demonstrates how Nixon’s time-centred theory valuably foregrounds long-term ramifications in a context where the churn of election and policy cycles often sets a short-term view.

This article examines how families relate emotionally to their ancestors as they deal with the discovery of past family secrets. In response to Eduardo Bericat’s (2012) call for sociologists of emotion to pay closer attention to the ways that ‘emotional experiences happen over time’, I explore how families imagine and register the emotions of the past. To do this, I draw on concepts from the sociology of the family and personal life and cultural studies of affect and emotion. I use these concepts to examine what I term ‘emotional proximities’ within responses from a qualitative survey about intergenerational family secrets. The analysis explores how respondents locate emotions as both the cause and effect of family secrets, but crucially also the force that cuts or ties descendants to their ancestors. This study opens up our capacity to consider what work emotions do within families. I argue that attention to how families navigate the emotions that surround inherited secrets foregrounds the emotional labour that goes into sustaining family identities over time.

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This article highlights the significance of family history research for memory studies. It provides an overview of the economic and cultural impact of this popular practice as well as a survey of the interdisciplinary field of research emerging around questions of genealogy and identity. It then develops a framework for engaging with the intergenerational, socially responsive memory work of family historians drawing from Paul Connerton’s typography of forgetting, Maurice Halbwach’s theory of social memory and Karl Mannheim’s notion of generations. The article grounds this framework with a case study about generational conflicts in Australian family histories, specifically around the shifting status of the convict ancestor, from a figure of secrecy and shame to one of pride and intrigue. I argue that family history research reveals the process by which generations have shaped memory, editing ‘the family narrative’ in response to changing social ideas about which kinds of identities and families hold value and promise. The names and dates on family trees therefore tell the stories not just of a discrete set of individuals but also of how social, national and generational interests interlink to produce the narratives we live by in both intimate and public spheres.