Forever young: creative responses to challenging issues in biographical research

Biographical research has a long tradition in social sciences. Being an incredibly dynamic interdisciplinary field, it has evolved in its core mission to study the links between individuals and society, strongly anchored in its tradition while also experimenting new approaches. In this paper we discuss a number of challenges resulting from this noteworthy development (theoretical, methodological, object-related and singularity-related) and the creative strategies put into practice by social scientists to answer and overcome them (in observing subjectivity, in the methodological devices implemented and in the analytical procedures applied). These issues and creativity are transversal to the biographical research field (also in its connection to the life course perspective) and are particularly present in the 11 articles brought together in this themed volume of Contemporary Social Science. Although coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and different parts of the world, and developing approaches focused on heterogeneous research topics and methodologies, these papers illustrate how challenging biographical research can be and how resourceful, imaginative and innovative social scientists need to be to overcome those issues.