The social life of things, in the aftermath of war and forced displacement, is associated with change in significance and value. Against a background of massive destruction and dispossession, object survival is exceptional. However, not every object that survives gains value equally. Private possessions that survive might not be attended to or be discarded. This complicates a straightforward coupling of person and surviving object. In this paper, the of biographic objects is addressed. My interview partners fled the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s as children. The objects they presented in biographic interviews have accompanied them throughout their lives. Rather than being mere prompts to tell life stories, these biographic objects, I suggest with Barad's study, emerged in tandem with the biographic subject. By example of a wartime letter and a childhood object, I demonstrate how these things become biographic objects as they afford social action at various points in people's lives. My main argument is that things come to be biographic objects because they afford agency in specific socio-historic constellations.

In this article, the authors consider breathless adults with advanced non-malignant lung disease and their relationship with health objects. This issue is especially relevant now during the Covid-19 pandemic, where the experiences of breathlessness and dependence on related medical objects have sudden and global relevance. These objects include ambulatory oxygen, oxygen concentrators and inhalers, and non-pharmacological objects such as self-monitoring devices and self-management technologies. The authors consider this relationship between things and people using an interdisciplinary approach employing psychoanalytic theory (in particular Winnicott's theory of object relations and object use), Science and Technology Studies (STS) and phenomenology. This collaborative approach allows them to relate patient use of health objects to ways of thinking about the body, dependency, autonomy, safety and sense-making within the context of palliative care. The authors illustrate the theoretical discussion with three reflective vignettes from therapeutic practice and conclude by suggesting further interdisciplinary research to develop the conceptual and practice-based links between psychoanalytic theory, STS and phenomenology to better understand individual embodied experiences of breathlessness. They call for palliative care-infused, psychoanalytically informed interventions that acknowledge breathless patients' dependence on things and people, concomitant with the need for autonomy in being-towards-dying.