Soft materials—including polymers, gels, elastomers, and biological tissues—exhibit rich and complex behaviours that challenge conventional theories of solid mechanics. Their highly deformable and often inelastic nature gives rise to strongly non-linear, dissipative mechanisms associated with fracture, cavitation, cutting, and puncture, among others. Owing to their anisotropic, hierarchical, and adaptive microstructures, deformation, damage and failure processes are tightly coupled to micromechanical mechanisms such as crosslink rupture, fibre reorientation, and degradation. Therefore, the mechanics of soft materials frequently involves interactions across multiple scales, where microscopic properties and macrostructural effects jointly govern material response. Understanding and predicting such mechanisms is central to applications ranging from soft robotics and medical devices to tissue and foodstuff engineering. Computational approaches must capture large elastic and inelastic deformations, instabilities, and failure patterns, often with evolving discontinuities. At the same time, state-of-the-art experimental methods, such as digital image correlation, rheology, and nanoindentation enable high-resolution data that inform and validate sophisticated models. This mini-symposium aims to bring together researchers working at the intersection of solid mechanics, materials science, bioengineering, and applied physics and mathematics to discuss current advances and identify future directions. We particularly welcome contributions that address both fundamental and applied aspects of fracture, inelasticity and failure, from either computational or experimental perspectives. Topics include, but are not limited to: • Constitutive modelling—continuum and micromechanical—for soft materials, including fracture, damage, rate effects, and instabilities; • Fracture- and contact-driven phenomena, including cutting and cavitation; • Coupled problems and multiphysics failure in soft materials; • Data-driven and hybrid modelling approaches for soft material behaviour and failure; • Experimental characterization of soft materials and tissues, including fracture; • Numerical methods for simulating discontinuities and complex failure patterns at large deformations, e.g., cohesive zone, phase-field, and configurational forces models; • Applications, e.g., in biomedical engineering, surgery, adhesives, and food industry.