Jane Ribbens Mccarthy
Biographic Data
| ID | 261053 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jane Ribbens Mccarthy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jane Ribbens |
| FAMILY NAME | Mccarthy |
| SIGNATURE | MCCARTHY J R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2827-7453 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 253 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Decolonising the aftermath of death in UK contexts: Theoretical Approaches, Institutional ‘Constraints’, and Everyday Experiences
Innovative decolonising work always entails going beyond diversity, but has only recently been raised in relation to ‘bereavement studies’. This paper explores what it may entail to ‘decolonise’ death and its continuing aftermath in the lives of the living. In the UK, documented experiences of racialised inequalities and discrimination have clearly evidenced the pervasiveness of institutional racism across many key areas of life. In the bereaveme…
If I break your leg, you won’t ask me to fix it for you: Innovative explorations in ‘decolonising’ UK bereavement services
This paper acknowledges that decolonising white-led UK bereavement services is an ambitious endeavour, addressing the arrogance and inequities embedded in the Whiteness of coloniality/modernity. Specialised ‘bereavement support services’ (BSS) may in themselves represent an anachronism of a modernity whose core narrative of control and progress through rational scientific knowledge is profoundly challenged by death. In this paper, we address theo…
Contemporary responses in Africa to the aftermath of death: Developments and Decolonising Challenges
Dominated by scholars and empirical material from Europe, North America, New Zealand and Australia, death and bereavement studies have often assumed the universality of their knowledge. This limits the epistemic and ontological potential of the field and can result in limiting understanding of death and its aftermath ‘elsewhere’. Further, because of the political and economic power of these centres for the study of death, it has also resulted in …
The Aftermath of Death in the Continuing Lives of the Living: Extending 'Bereavement' Paradigms through Family and Relational Perspectives
While there is a significant interdisciplinary and international literature available on death, dying and bereavement, literature addressing responses to death is dominated by assumptions about individuality, framing 'bereavement' and 'grief' in terms of the inner psychic life of the individual. Scholarly literature tells us little about how the continuing aftermath of death is experienced in the everyday, relational lives of the living. Inspired…
Family sociology as a theoretical enterprise? A personal reflection
David Morgan’s contributions to family sociology started from a direct engagement with theoretical perspectives, but his 1996 publication, Family Connections , took his family sociology in a new, somewhat ‘fuzzy’ direction. Two key motifs for his later work are the emphasis on ‘family’ as an adjective, and its fruitfulness when conjoined with the doing of ‘practices’. Yet his 1996 text also identified key theoretical themes he considered importan…
Time-space practices of care after a family death in urban Senegal
This paper contributes to studies of care practices and care ethics beyond the Minority world by analysing informal caringscapes after a family death in urban Senegal. Based on the findings of a qualitative study in the cities of Dakar and Kaolack, we explore exchanges of care by the living for the living in the period immediately following the death, and changes in these care practices over the longer term. We focus on mobilities and changing ca…
Diversity challenges from urban West Africa: How Senegalese family deaths illuminate dominant understandings of ‘bereavement’
Based on interviews with Senegalese people living in four contemporary urban neighbourhoods, who had experienced the death of an adult family member, we explore how the research challenged and surprised the White, British members of the research team. Such challenges help to shed light on some dominant, taken-for-granted understandings of ‘bereavement’ based in ‘Western’ perspectives. The surprises include how the death was discussed and explaine…
Unpacking ‘family troubles’, care and relationality across time and space
Despite significant work on family geographies in recent years, geographers have paid less attention to changes and challenges that may be considered 'family troubles' in diverse contexts. Through this editorial and the special section, we unpack time-space dynamics of ‘family troubles’ in diverse contexts, with a particular focus on care and relationality. Our discussion foregrounds ambiguities and tensions surrounding geographical proximity and…
Family Troubles' and 'Troubling Families: Opening Up Fertile Ground
The twin themes of 'family troubles' and 'troubling families' are closely linked, but they are also each distinct in themselves, and nuanced in particular ways. Rooted particularly (but not solely) in our U.K.-based academic experiences, we offer an account of family studies as siloed between a binary of 'the mainstream', focused on what may be implicitly understood as 'ordinary' family lives, and 'the problematic', focused on aspects of family l…
Making Sense of Family Deaths in Urban Senegal: Diversities, Contexts, and Comparisons
Despite calls for cross-cultural research, Minority world perspectives still dominate death and bereavement studies, emphasizing individualized emotions and neglecting contextual diversities. In research concerned with contemporary African societies, on the other hand, death and loss are generally subsumed within concerns about AIDS or poverty, with little attention paid to the emotional and personal significance of a death. Here, we draw on inte…
Troubling Children's Families: Who Is Troubled and Why? Approaches to Inter-Cultural Dialogue
This article draws on multidisciplinary perspectives to consider the need and the possibilities for inter-cultural dialogue concerning families that may be seen by some to be 'troubling'. Starting from the premise that 'troubles' are a 'normal' part of children's family lives, we consider the boundary between 'normal' troubles and troubles that are troubling (whether to family members or others). Such troubling families potentially indicate an in…
Interpreting ‘grief’ in Senegal: Language, emotions and cross-cultural translation in a francophone African context
This article reflects on the profound complexities of translating and interpreting ‘grief’, and emotions and responses to death more broadly, in multilingual, cross-cultural contexts. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in urban Senegal, West Africa, we discuss the exchange of meanings surrounding grief and death through language, including the process of translation, in its broadest sense, between multiple languages (Wolof, French, English…
The Institutionalisation of ‘TongNian’ and ‘childhood’ in China and Britain: Exploring Cautious Comparisons
This article engages with the question of how theorisation of the social construction of childhood can be applied across cultural contexts, taking China and Britain as examples. The paper draws on collaborative dialogue between scholars from the People's Republic of China and Britain, and literatures from both Anglophone and Mandarin sources. It takes forward emergent work on theorising childhood from diverse global perspectives by focusing on th…
Producing emotionally sensed knowledge? Reflexivity and emotions in researching responses to death
This paper reflects on the methodological complexities of producing emotionally-sensed knowledge about responses to family deaths in urban Senegal. Through engaging in ‘uncomfortable reflexivity’, we critically explore the multiple positionings of the research team comprised of UK, Senegalese and Burkinabé researchers and those of participants in Senegal and interrogate our own cultural assumptions. We explore the emotional labour of the research…
Unearthing Psychological Predictors of Financial Planning for Retirement Among Late Career Older Workers: Do Self-perceptions of Aging Matter
In this study, we explore psychological predictors of retirement planning behavior among late career older workers. Drawing on a sample of 1,946 older workers aged between 50 and 65 years from the first wave of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, we investigate whether self-perceptions of aging and awareness of aging influence financial planning for retirement. Our results demonstrate that, even when controlling for age, gender, employment co…
Embodied Relationality and Caring after Death
We explore contested meanings around care and relationality through the under-explored case of caring after death, throwing the relational significance of 'bodies' into sharp relief. While the dominant social imaginary and forms of knowledge production in many affluent western societies take death to signify an absolute loss of the other in the demise of their physical body, important implications follow from recognising that embodied relational …
Understanding family meanings: A reflective text
The politics of concepts: Family and Its (Putative) Replacements
The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move withinBritish sociology to subsume (or sometimes, even replace) the concept of 'family' within ideas about personal life, intimacy and kinship. It calls attention to what will be lost sight of by this conceptual move: an understanding of the collective whole beyond the aggregation of individuals; the creation of lacunae that will be (partially) filled by other disciplines; and engage…
The Powerful Relational Language of 'Family: Togetherness, Belonging and Personhood
This article examines the notion of 'family' to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be 'part of'. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to individuality and family, evoking differing understandings of the self and personhood. I consider these id…
They all look as if they're coping, but I'm not’: The Relational Power/lessness of ‘Youth’ in Responding to Experiences of Bereavement
Experience of significant bereavement is reported by the majority of young people in contemporary western societies, but it receives little attention from mainstream services or academics, and this marginality is paralleled in young people's everyday bereavement experiences. Existing academic and professional work concerned with children and young people's experiences of bereavement largely centres on cognitive understandings of death, and indivi…
Making Families: Moral Tales of Parenting and Step-Parenting
This book goes to the heart of academic, political and popular debates, as well as professional concerns, about the nature of contemporary family life and parenting. Families are widely discussed in western societies as breaking down or as radically changing, with step-families in particular seen as evidence of such trends. In one of the first British in-depth sociological research studies for over two decades, this book provide evidence of paren…
Multiple perspectives on the 'family' lives of young people: Methodological and theoretical issues in case study research
The use of interviews from related individuals has become increasingly common in social research. This is particularly apparent in the area of family sociology, which has previously been criticized for relying on research of family lives based solely on interviews with mothers. Obtaining such accounts can raise postmodern ontological and epistemological themes of multiple perspectives and multiple realities, but there has been little explicit dis…
Classroom Management in a Navajo Middle School
Classroom management presents a serious challenge in most schools, but especially in schools on a Navajo Reservation that have been traditionally academically low-performing schools. There appears to be a mismatch between the attitudes, skills, and behaviors Navajo children bring with them to school and the expectations schools have for their behavior. This becomes especially evident at the middle-school level as peer pressure reaches its zenith,…
Step-Fathering: Comparing Policy and Everyday Experience in Britain and Sweden
Step-fathering is becoming increasingly common in contemporary western societies, yet it has received little research attention from either social policy or sociological perspectives. In this article, we draw on our empirical studies of step-families in Britain and Sweden to argue that social context is important in shaping step-fathers' understandings of their position. Policy and legislation in these countries emphasise the importance of ascrib…
Illuminating Meanings of `the Private' in Sociological Thought: A Response to Joe Bailey
In a recent article in Sociology, Joe Bailey maps out some important recent developments in sociological theorising, which he represents as `the private'. In this he seeks to use `the private' for one particular sociological purpose, but may be in danger of obscuring other purposes that may also be important. In his discussions he largely neglects the considerable body of feminist literature around public and private, drawing very heavily instead…
Moral Tales of the Child and the Adult: Narratives of Contemporary Family Lives under Changing Circumstances
Family lives are an area where people's moral identities are crucially at stake. Yet the significance of dependent children to the work needed to sustain morally adequate adult identities is largely overlooked. Furthermore, the particular situation of divorce or separation and repartnering where children are involved is fundamentally relevant to current sociological debates about the changing nature of marriage and family life. Notions of the pur…
The Powerful Relational Language of 'Family: Togetherness, Belonging and Personhood
This article examines the notion of 'family' to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be 'part of'. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to individuality and family, evoking differing understandings of the self and personhood. I consider these id…
The politics of concepts: Family and Its (Putative) Replacements
The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move withinBritish sociology to subsume (or sometimes, even replace) the concept of 'family' within ideas about personal life, intimacy and kinship. It calls attention to what will be lost sight of by this conceptual move: an understanding of the collective whole beyond the aggregation of individuals; the creation of lacunae that will be (partially) filled by other disciplines; and engage…
Multiple perspectives on the 'family' lives of young people: Methodological and theoretical issues in case study research
The use of interviews from related individuals has become increasingly common in social research. This is particularly apparent in the area of family sociology, which has previously been criticized for relying on research of family lives based solely on interviews with mothers. Obtaining such accounts can raise postmodern ontological and epistemological themes of multiple perspectives and multiple realities, but there has been little explicit dis…
Producing emotionally sensed knowledge? Reflexivity and emotions in researching responses to death
This paper reflects on the methodological complexities of producing emotionally-sensed knowledge about responses to family deaths in urban Senegal. Through engaging in ‘uncomfortable reflexivity’, we critically explore the multiple positionings of the research team comprised of UK, Senegalese and Burkinabé researchers and those of participants in Senegal and interrogate our own cultural assumptions. We explore the emotional labour of the research…
The Aftermath of Death in the Continuing Lives of the Living: Extending 'Bereavement' Paradigms through Family and Relational Perspectives
While there is a significant interdisciplinary and international literature available on death, dying and bereavement, literature addressing responses to death is dominated by assumptions about individuality, framing 'bereavement' and 'grief' in terms of the inner psychic life of the individual. Scholarly literature tells us little about how the continuing aftermath of death is experienced in the everyday, relational lives of the living. Inspired…
Troubling Children's Families: Who Is Troubled and Why? Approaches to Inter-Cultural Dialogue
This article draws on multidisciplinary perspectives to consider the need and the possibilities for inter-cultural dialogue concerning families that may be seen by some to be 'troubling'. Starting from the premise that 'troubles' are a 'normal' part of children's family lives, we consider the boundary between 'normal' troubles and troubles that are troubling (whether to family members or others). Such troubling families potentially indicate an in…
Unearthing Psychological Predictors of Financial Planning for Retirement Among Late Career Older Workers: Do Self-perceptions of Aging Matter
In this study, we explore psychological predictors of retirement planning behavior among late career older workers. Drawing on a sample of 1,946 older workers aged between 50 and 65 years from the first wave of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, we investigate whether self-perceptions of aging and awareness of aging influence financial planning for retirement. Our results demonstrate that, even when controlling for age, gender, employment co…
They all look as if they're coping, but I'm not’: The Relational Power/lessness of ‘Youth’ in Responding to Experiences of Bereavement
Experience of significant bereavement is reported by the majority of young people in contemporary western societies, but it receives little attention from mainstream services or academics, and this marginality is paralleled in young people's everyday bereavement experiences. Existing academic and professional work concerned with children and young people's experiences of bereavement largely centres on cognitive understandings of death, and indivi…
Illuminating Meanings of `the Private' in Sociological Thought: A Response to Joe Bailey
In a recent article in Sociology, Joe Bailey maps out some important recent developments in sociological theorising, which he represents as `the private'. In this he seeks to use `the private' for one particular sociological purpose, but may be in danger of obscuring other purposes that may also be important. In his discussions he largely neglects the considerable body of feminist literature around public and private, drawing very heavily instead…
Embodied Relationality and Caring after Death
We explore contested meanings around care and relationality through the under-explored case of caring after death, throwing the relational significance of 'bodies' into sharp relief. While the dominant social imaginary and forms of knowledge production in many affluent western societies take death to signify an absolute loss of the other in the demise of their physical body, important implications follow from recognising that embodied relational …
Illuminating Meanings of ‘the Private’ in Sociological Thought: A response to Joe Bailey
In a recent article in Sociology, Joe Bailey maps out some important recent developments in sociological theorising, which he represents as ‘the private’. In this he seeks to use ‘the private’ for one particular sociological purpose, but may be in danger of obscuring other purposes that may also be important. In his discussions he largely neglects the considerable body of feminist literature around public and private, drawing very heavily instead…
Unpacking ‘family troubles’, care and relationality across time and space
Despite significant work on family geographies in recent years, geographers have paid less attention to changes and challenges that may be considered 'family troubles' in diverse contexts. Through this editorial and the special section, we unpack time-space dynamics of ‘family troubles’ in diverse contexts, with a particular focus on care and relationality. Our discussion foregrounds ambiguities and tensions surrounding geographical proximity and…
Family Troubles' and 'Troubling Families: Opening Up Fertile Ground
The twin themes of 'family troubles' and 'troubling families' are closely linked, but they are also each distinct in themselves, and nuanced in particular ways. Rooted particularly (but not solely) in our U.K.-based academic experiences, we offer an account of family studies as siloed between a binary of 'the mainstream', focused on what may be implicitly understood as 'ordinary' family lives, and 'the problematic', focused on aspects of family l…
Classroom Management in a Navajo Middle School
Classroom management presents a serious challenge in most schools, but especially in schools on a Navajo Reservation that have been traditionally academically low-performing schools. There appears to be a mismatch between the attitudes, skills, and behaviors Navajo children bring with them to school and the expectations schools have for their behavior. This becomes especially evident at the middle-school level as peer pressure reaches its zenith,…
Decolonising the aftermath of death in UK contexts: Theoretical Approaches, Institutional ‘Constraints’, and Everyday Experiences
Innovative decolonising work always entails going beyond diversity, but has only recently been raised in relation to ‘bereavement studies’. This paper explores what it may entail to ‘decolonise’ death and its continuing aftermath in the lives of the living. In the UK, documented experiences of racialised inequalities and discrimination have clearly evidenced the pervasiveness of institutional racism across many key areas of life. In the bereaveme…
Family sociology as a theoretical enterprise? A personal reflection
David Morgan’s contributions to family sociology started from a direct engagement with theoretical perspectives, but his 1996 publication, Family Connections , took his family sociology in a new, somewhat ‘fuzzy’ direction. Two key motifs for his later work are the emphasis on ‘family’ as an adjective, and its fruitfulness when conjoined with the doing of ‘practices’. Yet his 1996 text also identified key theoretical themes he considered importan…
Time-space practices of care after a family death in urban Senegal
This paper contributes to studies of care practices and care ethics beyond the Minority world by analysing informal caringscapes after a family death in urban Senegal. Based on the findings of a qualitative study in the cities of Dakar and Kaolack, we explore exchanges of care by the living for the living in the period immediately following the death, and changes in these care practices over the longer term. We focus on mobilities and changing ca…
If I break your leg, you won’t ask me to fix it for you: Innovative explorations in ‘decolonising’ UK bereavement services
This paper acknowledges that decolonising white-led UK bereavement services is an ambitious endeavour, addressing the arrogance and inequities embedded in the Whiteness of coloniality/modernity. Specialised ‘bereavement support services’ (BSS) may in themselves represent an anachronism of a modernity whose core narrative of control and progress through rational scientific knowledge is profoundly challenged by death. In this paper, we address theo…
Contemporary responses in Africa to the aftermath of death: Developments and Decolonising Challenges
Dominated by scholars and empirical material from Europe, North America, New Zealand and Australia, death and bereavement studies have often assumed the universality of their knowledge. This limits the epistemic and ontological potential of the field and can result in limiting understanding of death and its aftermath ‘elsewhere’. Further, because of the political and economic power of these centres for the study of death, it has also resulted in …
Step-Fathering: Comparing Policy and Everyday Experience in Britain and Sweden
Step-fathering is becoming increasingly common in contemporary western societies, yet it has received little research attention from either social policy or sociological perspectives. In this article, we draw on our empirical studies of step-families in Britain and Sweden to argue that social context is important in shaping step-fathers' understandings of their position. Policy and legislation in these countries emphasise the importance of ascrib…
Moral Tales of the Child and the Adult: Narratives of Contemporary Family Lives under Changing Circumstances
Family lives are an area where people's moral identities are crucially at stake. Yet the significance of dependent children to the work needed to sustain morally adequate adult identities is largely overlooked. Furthermore, the particular situation of divorce or separation and repartnering where children are involved is fundamentally relevant to current sociological debates about the changing nature of marriage and family life. Notions of the pur…
Illuminating Meanings of `the Private' in Sociological Thought: A Response to Joe Bailey
In a recent article in Sociology, Joe Bailey maps out some important recent developments in sociological theorising, which he represents as `the private'. In this he seeks to use `the private' for one particular sociological purpose, but may be in danger of obscuring other purposes that may also be important. In his discussions he largely neglects the considerable body of feminist literature around public and private, drawing very heavily instead…
Illuminating Meanings of ‘the Private’ in Sociological Thought: A response to Joe Bailey
In a recent article in Sociology, Joe Bailey maps out some important recent developments in sociological theorising, which he represents as ‘the private’. In this he seeks to use ‘the private’ for one particular sociological purpose, but may be in danger of obscuring other purposes that may also be important. In his discussions he largely neglects the considerable body of feminist literature around public and private, drawing very heavily instead…
Step-Fathering: Comparing Policy and Everyday Experience in Britain and Sweden
Step-fathering is becoming increasingly common in contemporary western societies, yet it has received little research attention from either social policy or sociological perspectives. In this article, we draw on our empirical studies of step-families in Britain and Sweden to argue that social context is important in shaping step-fathers' understandings of their position. Policy and legislation in these countries emphasise the importance of ascrib…
Making Families: Moral Tales of Parenting and Step-Parenting
This book goes to the heart of academic, political and popular debates, as well as professional concerns, about the nature of contemporary family life and parenting. Families are widely discussed in western societies as breaking down or as radically changing, with step-families in particular seen as evidence of such trends. In one of the first British in-depth sociological research studies for over two decades, this book provide evidence of paren…
Multiple perspectives on the 'family' lives of young people: Methodological and theoretical issues in case study research
The use of interviews from related individuals has become increasingly common in social research. This is particularly apparent in the area of family sociology, which has previously been criticized for relying on research of family lives based solely on interviews with mothers. Obtaining such accounts can raise postmodern ontological and epistemological themes of multiple perspectives and multiple realities, but there has been little explicit dis…
Classroom Management in a Navajo Middle School
Classroom management presents a serious challenge in most schools, but especially in schools on a Navajo Reservation that have been traditionally academically low-performing schools. There appears to be a mismatch between the attitudes, skills, and behaviors Navajo children bring with them to school and the expectations schools have for their behavior. This becomes especially evident at the middle-school level as peer pressure reaches its zenith,…
They all look as if they're coping, but I'm not’: The Relational Power/lessness of ‘Youth’ in Responding to Experiences of Bereavement
Experience of significant bereavement is reported by the majority of young people in contemporary western societies, but it receives little attention from mainstream services or academics, and this marginality is paralleled in young people's everyday bereavement experiences. Existing academic and professional work concerned with children and young people's experiences of bereavement largely centres on cognitive understandings of death, and indivi…
Understanding family meanings: A reflective text
The politics of concepts: Family and Its (Putative) Replacements
The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move withinBritish sociology to subsume (or sometimes, even replace) the concept of 'family' within ideas about personal life, intimacy and kinship. It calls attention to what will be lost sight of by this conceptual move: an understanding of the collective whole beyond the aggregation of individuals; the creation of lacunae that will be (partially) filled by other disciplines; and engage…
The Powerful Relational Language of 'Family: Togetherness, Belonging and Personhood
This article examines the notion of 'family' to consider how it may be understood in people's everyday lives. Certain recurrent and powerful motifs are apparent, notably themes of togetherness and belonging, in the context of a unit that the person can be 'part of'. At the same time, there may be important variations in the meanings given to individuality and family, evoking differing understandings of the self and personhood. I consider these id…
Embodied Relationality and Caring after Death
We explore contested meanings around care and relationality through the under-explored case of caring after death, throwing the relational significance of 'bodies' into sharp relief. While the dominant social imaginary and forms of knowledge production in many affluent western societies take death to signify an absolute loss of the other in the demise of their physical body, important implications follow from recognising that embodied relational …
Unearthing Psychological Predictors of Financial Planning for Retirement Among Late Career Older Workers: Do Self-perceptions of Aging Matter
In this study, we explore psychological predictors of retirement planning behavior among late career older workers. Drawing on a sample of 1,946 older workers aged between 50 and 65 years from the first wave of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, we investigate whether self-perceptions of aging and awareness of aging influence financial planning for retirement. Our results demonstrate that, even when controlling for age, gender, employment co…
Interpreting ‘grief’ in Senegal: Language, emotions and cross-cultural translation in a francophone African context
This article reflects on the profound complexities of translating and interpreting ‘grief’, and emotions and responses to death more broadly, in multilingual, cross-cultural contexts. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in urban Senegal, West Africa, we discuss the exchange of meanings surrounding grief and death through language, including the process of translation, in its broadest sense, between multiple languages (Wolof, French, English…
The Institutionalisation of ‘TongNian’ and ‘childhood’ in China and Britain: Exploring Cautious Comparisons
This article engages with the question of how theorisation of the social construction of childhood can be applied across cultural contexts, taking China and Britain as examples. The paper draws on collaborative dialogue between scholars from the People's Republic of China and Britain, and literatures from both Anglophone and Mandarin sources. It takes forward emergent work on theorising childhood from diverse global perspectives by focusing on th…
Producing emotionally sensed knowledge? Reflexivity and emotions in researching responses to death
This paper reflects on the methodological complexities of producing emotionally-sensed knowledge about responses to family deaths in urban Senegal. Through engaging in ‘uncomfortable reflexivity’, we critically explore the multiple positionings of the research team comprised of UK, Senegalese and Burkinabé researchers and those of participants in Senegal and interrogate our own cultural assumptions. We explore the emotional labour of the research…
Making Sense of Family Deaths in Urban Senegal: Diversities, Contexts, and Comparisons
Despite calls for cross-cultural research, Minority world perspectives still dominate death and bereavement studies, emphasizing individualized emotions and neglecting contextual diversities. In research concerned with contemporary African societies, on the other hand, death and loss are generally subsumed within concerns about AIDS or poverty, with little attention paid to the emotional and personal significance of a death. Here, we draw on inte…
Troubling Children's Families: Who Is Troubled and Why? Approaches to Inter-Cultural Dialogue
This article draws on multidisciplinary perspectives to consider the need and the possibilities for inter-cultural dialogue concerning families that may be seen by some to be 'troubling'. Starting from the premise that 'troubles' are a 'normal' part of children's family lives, we consider the boundary between 'normal' troubles and troubles that are troubling (whether to family members or others). Such troubling families potentially indicate an in…
Diversity challenges from urban West Africa: How Senegalese family deaths illuminate dominant understandings of ‘bereavement’
Based on interviews with Senegalese people living in four contemporary urban neighbourhoods, who had experienced the death of an adult family member, we explore how the research challenged and surprised the White, British members of the research team. Such challenges help to shed light on some dominant, taken-for-granted understandings of ‘bereavement’ based in ‘Western’ perspectives. The surprises include how the death was discussed and explaine…
Unpacking ‘family troubles’, care and relationality across time and space
Despite significant work on family geographies in recent years, geographers have paid less attention to changes and challenges that may be considered 'family troubles' in diverse contexts. Through this editorial and the special section, we unpack time-space dynamics of ‘family troubles’ in diverse contexts, with a particular focus on care and relationality. Our discussion foregrounds ambiguities and tensions surrounding geographical proximity and…
Family Troubles' and 'Troubling Families: Opening Up Fertile Ground
The twin themes of 'family troubles' and 'troubling families' are closely linked, but they are also each distinct in themselves, and nuanced in particular ways. Rooted particularly (but not solely) in our U.K.-based academic experiences, we offer an account of family studies as siloed between a binary of 'the mainstream', focused on what may be implicitly understood as 'ordinary' family lives, and 'the problematic', focused on aspects of family l…
Family sociology as a theoretical enterprise? A personal reflection
David Morgan’s contributions to family sociology started from a direct engagement with theoretical perspectives, but his 1996 publication, Family Connections , took his family sociology in a new, somewhat ‘fuzzy’ direction. Two key motifs for his later work are the emphasis on ‘family’ as an adjective, and its fruitfulness when conjoined with the doing of ‘practices’. Yet his 1996 text also identified key theoretical themes he considered importan…
Time-space practices of care after a family death in urban Senegal
This paper contributes to studies of care practices and care ethics beyond the Minority world by analysing informal caringscapes after a family death in urban Senegal. Based on the findings of a qualitative study in the cities of Dakar and Kaolack, we explore exchanges of care by the living for the living in the period immediately following the death, and changes in these care practices over the longer term. We focus on mobilities and changing ca…
The Aftermath of Death in the Continuing Lives of the Living: Extending 'Bereavement' Paradigms through Family and Relational Perspectives
While there is a significant interdisciplinary and international literature available on death, dying and bereavement, literature addressing responses to death is dominated by assumptions about individuality, framing 'bereavement' and 'grief' in terms of the inner psychic life of the individual. Scholarly literature tells us little about how the continuing aftermath of death is experienced in the everyday, relational lives of the living. Inspired…
Decolonising the aftermath of death in UK contexts: Theoretical Approaches, Institutional ‘Constraints’, and Everyday Experiences
Innovative decolonising work always entails going beyond diversity, but has only recently been raised in relation to ‘bereavement studies’. This paper explores what it may entail to ‘decolonise’ death and its continuing aftermath in the lives of the living. In the UK, documented experiences of racialised inequalities and discrimination have clearly evidenced the pervasiveness of institutional racism across many key areas of life. In the bereaveme…
Sociology (24 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Migration, Health and Trauma (7 works)