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A co-hosted event about bereavement from Open Thanatology and the WELS Faculty, supported by the Comms teams. Features a 1 hour recording (transcript and overview provided) of four panelists providing their perspectives on 'Bereavement - what helps' based on their research and professional experience. Topics included grief support pyramid, men's grief, social media, and cultural diversity and bereavement.

Seminar presentation by Dr Jane Ribbens McCarthy given to the Open Thanatology group in September 2021.

Despite calls for cross-cultural research, Minority world perspectives still dominate death and bereavement studies, emphasising individualised 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 interactionist sociology to present major themes from a qualitative study of family deaths in urban Senegal, theoretically framed through the duality of meanings-in-context. Such themes included: family and community as support and motivation; religious beliefs and practices as frameworks for solace and (regulatory) meaning; material circumstances as these are intrinsically bound up with emotions. While we identify the experience of (embodied, emotional) pain as a common response across Minority and Majority worlds, we also explore significant divergencies, varying according to localised contexts and broader power dynamics.

Both family sociology and childhood studies have sought in recent years to reflect on their most basic assumptions, most notably what is means to be ‘a child’ or ‘a family’. While this has led to some productive and challenging debates in affluent Anglophone and Western European contexts, these discussions have not fundamentally re-thought these challenges through Majority world vantage points. Drawing on the work of the philosopher and sinologist François Julienne, and his argument that Western European languages are rooted in an ontology of categorical thinking, we raise the question of what is ‘family’ and who is ‘child’ in diverse linguistic contexts. Drawing on the examples of 'child' in China and ‘family’ in Senegal, we explore the ways in which processes of translation perform a neo-colonial outcome by re-framing these terms through categorical thinking, allowing much of the nuances, complexities and fluidity of their meanings to ‘slip away’

Based on interviews with Senegalese people living in four contemporary urban localities, 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 explained; patterns of family living and the implications for how individuals responded to the death; the emotional significance of particular religious expectations; and the emotional implications of material hardships. After exploring how interviewees responded to the deaths in Senegal, we consider how these responses compare with expectations and taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘bereavement’ in the contemporary UK. We conclude by discussing the implications for bereavement support and professional practice, in relation to diverse responses to death.

Little empirical work has been conducted on geographies of loss in majority Muslim contexts to date. Based on qualitative research, this paper explores consolation and religious meaning-making after a family death in urban Senegal. We draw on in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 59 family members in two cities, Dakar and Kaolack. Drawing on Klass' (2014) multi-faceted understanding of consolation and religious solace, we explore participants' narratives of the death of a relative, and discuss the role of co-presence and practices of remembrance in providing consolation. The frequent use of 'God's will' and other religious refrains and investing the moment of death with religious significance appeared to provide solace and help participants accept the death. The co-presence of family and community members was crucial in helping to share their pain and provide practical and material support that enabled family members to 'keep going' and 'get by' in poor urban neighbourhoods. Alongside the often welcome sense of presence of the deceased, prayers, offerings and religious ceremonies on the anniversary of the death were an important means of remembrance and the expression of continuing bonds that provided consolation. The research demonstrates the extensive, often taken-for-granted, ways that religious beliefs, the worldview and wider community shape cultural narratives of a family death and may limit the expression of grief and the extent to which negative impacts on surviving family members' lives can sometimes be acknowledged.

This study provides the first in-depth understanding of responses to death, care and family relations in an urban West African context. The loss of a close adult relative is a significant life transition that almost everyone experiences at some point in the lifecourse and which may have a range of material, social and emotional consequences for children and families. The research aimed to investigate the material and emotional significance of a death of a close adult relative for family members of different genders and generations in urban Senegal. It aimed to explore how the death of a close relative impacts on identities, caring relations and responsibilities among families of varying socio-economic status and diverse ethnicities (focusing on the three largest ethnic groups, Wolof, Hal Pulaaren and Serer) in two cities.