It has been argued that lifecourse transitions are transformative moments for individuals when lifestyles, habits and behaviours are potentially open to contemplation and change. Within sustainability research such ‘moments of change’ are regarded as offering potential to encourage less environmentally damaging consumption patterns. Research on consumption indicates that orientations to material goods and their affective significance are complex. Whilst sociological work understands attachment to things as integral to maintaining kinship relations, this is hard to reconcile with long-standing moral concerns about materialism and psychological research which indicates a negative relationship between the acquisition of material objects and wellbeing, and the environmental implications of acquiring and divesting ‘stuff’. Yet there has been little engagement with how older people orient to their material possessions and divestment, the implications of this for later-life wellbeing and for environmental sustainability. In this paper, we draw these different strands of work together to understand how retirees relate to their material possessions and their divestment. Drawing on serial interviews with individuals in the United Kingdom, we explore how the transition to retirement highlights the complexity of participants’ attachment to things. While some items had profound relational significance, others were experienced as troublesome. Decisions on what to divest were shaped by pragmatic considerations and levels of attachment, whilst modes of divestment were aligned with values of thrift.

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of studies addressing older people's political participation. Much of this literature, however, can be criticised for neglecting important aspects of seniors’ political participation, such as its dynamics across the lifecourse, its gendered nature and the influence of the particular socio-political contexts in which participation occurs. In this paper we bring together all these issues to explore the relation between lifecourse transitions and participation in political organisations in Spanish men and women. We conducted life-story interviews with 40 highly engaged older political activists regarding their lifetime story of political commitment, and identified eight different lifecourse transitions affecting their participation in political organisations. Three of these transitions were related to the work domain and five to the family domain. Most of them were clearly gender-dependent, affecting men's and women's engagement in political organisations in different ways and to different degrees. Our study expands on previous research on lifespan-related aspects of political participation by showing that considering biographical, gendered and historical aspects is key to understanding the relationships between life transitions and participation in political organisations across the lifecourse.