Archaeologists have long been interested in contemporary material culture, but only recently has a dedicated subfield of archaeology of the contemporary world begun to emerge. Whilst concerned mainly with the archaeology of the early to mid-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in its explicit acknowledgement of the contemporary archaeological record as multi-temporal, it is not defined by a focus on a specific time period so much as a particular disposition towards time, material things, the archaeological process and its politics. This paper considers how the subfield might be characterised by its approaches to particular sources and its current and emerging thematic foci. A significant point of debate concerns the role of archaeology as a discipline through which to explore ongoing, contemporary socio-material practices-is archaeology purely concerned with the "abandoned" and the "ruined", or can it also provide a means by which to engage with and illuminate ongoing, contemporary and future socio-material practices? Headings