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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 process from an ethic of care perspective and reflect on how our multiple positionings and emotions influence the production and interpretation of the data, particularly exemplified through our differing responses to diverse meanings of 'family' and religious refrains. We show how our approach of 'uncomfortable reflexivity' helps to reveal the work of emotions in research, thereby producing 'emotionally sensed knowledge' about responses to death and contributing to the cross-cultural study of emotions.

Keywords: Feminist ethic of care; informal care; family relations; time-space practices; death and bereavement; ubuntu; Senegal west africa; ética feminista del cuidado; cuidado informal; relaciones familiares; prácticas espacio-temporales; muerte y duelo; Senegal; África Occidental; Éthique féministe du care; care informel; relations familiales; pratiques spatiotemporelles; mort et deuil; Sénégal Afrique occidentale EN Feminist ethic of care informal care family relations time-space practices death and bereavement ubuntu Senegal west africa ES ética feminista del cuidado cuidado informal relaciones familiares prácticas espacio-temporales muerte y duelo Senegal África Occidental FR Éthique féministe du care care informel relations familiales pratiques spatiotemporelles mort et deuil Sénégal Afrique occidentale 1174 1192 19 10/12/22 20221001 NES 221001 Introduction After her father's death, Diami (then aged 14) moved from Kaolack to Dakar to earn money to help her mother and siblings. Here, our discussion of caringscapes focuses on the role of time-space relationships in care practices and the importance of interactions between care practices and the social and physical infrastructures of care. While we do not set out to provide anything so ambitious as a "geohistory" of care practices in Senegal, we describe local geographies of care practices and explore how these are entangled with particular conceptions of how and by whom care should be done. Gendered inequalities in family care practices in South Africa have prompted some to note that Ubuntu's encouragement of communal care responsibilities through recognition of human interdependencies still supports a patriarchal division of care work (Gouws & Van Zyl, [15]). [Extracted from the article]

At this re-launch of the journal Bereavement, we explore the question, 'Do we need to decolonise bereavement studies?' We do not offer definitive answers, but rather seek to open up conversations. We briefly explore some of the main debates and explanations of what 'decolonising' means. In its broader understandings, this entails questions about the nature of the knowledge that underpins claims to 'expertise', since knowledge inevitably reflects the socio-historic position and biography of those who produce it. This raises uncomfortable issues about the 'universality' of that knowledge, and how to understand what is shared between human beings, including how to understand experiences of pain and suffering. In addressing the nature of 'bereavement studies', we first consider complexities of language and translation, before observing the heavy domination of the 'psy' disciplines in the affluent 'Minority World' (Punch, 2016), oriented towards individualised, medicalised and interventionist perspectives. We indicate work that seeks to challenge these limitations, including the decolonising of psychiatry itself. We argue the need for such decolonising approaches to go beyond cross-cultural work originating in the affluent 'Minority World', beyond interdisciplinarity, and beyond crucial work on equality, diversity and inclusivity. Bereavement, as a field of study and a set of practices, needs to take account of the legacies of complex colonial histories of exploitation and harm that continue to shape the world in general, and in particular, the aftermath of death in the continuing lives of the living. We conclude with some implications for 'bereavement' practice, from a UK perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 lives that may be of interest to social policy experts, professionals, and practitioners and geared toward interventions of some sort. What has been missing has been sociological attention to the pervasiveness of change and challenges as core for all family lives over time, with such changes sometimes experienced as troubling by family members themselves, and/or seen to be troubling by others such as professionals who saw them as "dysfunctional", or policy makers who saw them as "social problems". Practice and policy-oriented research has thus focused on interventions to "make things better", or to achieve "reforms", for families that are considered to be "problematic". Consequently, what may be described as the "normal troubles" of family lives have been largely neglected. In this article, we explore what is brought into view by focusing on "family troubles" and "troubling families"; we argue that these themes offer fertile ground for opening up new dialogue between these contrasting bodies of work, questioning and crossing boundaries, illuminating taken-for-granted assumptions, and encouraging fresh perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 intervention to prevent harm to less powerful family members (notably children). On what basis can such decisions be made in children’s family lives, how can this question be answered across diverse cultural contexts, and are all answers inevitably subject to uncertainty? Such questions arguably reframe and broaden existing debates about ‘child maltreatment’ across diverse cultural contexts. Beyond recognizing power dynamics, material inequalities, and historical and contemporary colonialism, we argue that attempts to answer the question on an empirical basis risk a form of neo-colonialism, since values inevitably permeate research and knowledge claims. We briefly exemplify such difficulties, examining psychological studies of childrearing in China and the application of neuroscience to early childhood interventions in the United Kingdom. Turning to issues of values and moral relativism, we also question the possibility of an objective moral standard that avoids cultural imperialism but ask whether cultural relativism is the only alternative position available. Here, we briefly explore other possibilities in the space between ‘facile’ universalism and ‘lazy’ relativism. Such approaches bring into focus core philosophical and cultural questions about the possibilities for ‘happiness’, and for what it means to be a ‘person’, living in the social world. Throughout, we centralize theoretical and conceptual issues, drawing on the work of the philosopher François Jullien to recognize the immense complexities inter-cultural dialogue entails in terms of language and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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). Our experiences demonstrate the crucial importance of involving interpreters and field researchers throughout the research process, to gain fundamental insight into the cultural nuances of indigenous languages and how these are translated and potentially re-framed in the process. We reflect on our iterative process of discussing emerging interpretations with participants in follow-up workshops and with our interpreter. This approach helped shed light on language use surrounding ‘grief’ and how this is bound up with wider socio-cultural norms which make particular emotions surrounding death and experiences/meanings of death and bereavement possible and ‘speak-able’. Our research calls for greater recognition in death and bereavement studies of the cultural specificity of conceptual frameworks developed in minority European socio-linguistic contexts and demonstrates the need for greater engagement with theoretical, empirical and methodological insights gained in diverse cultural contexts in the Majority world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 the institutionalisation of childhood in these countries, with particular reference to language, conceptualisation and legal frameworks relating to chronological age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 pro-duction 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 recog-nising that embodied relational experience can continue after death. Drawing on a model of embodied relational care encompassing a 'me', a 'you' and an 'us', we argue that after death 'me' and 'us' remain (though changed) while crucial dimensions of 'you' persist too. In unravelling the binary divide between living and dead bodies, other related dichotomies of mind/body, self/other, internal/external, and nature/ social are also called into question, extending debates concerning relationality and openness between living bodies. Through an exploration of autobiographical accounts and empirical research, we argue that embodied relationality expresses how connectedness is lived out after death in material practices and felt experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 individual intra-psychic processes and responses in the context of relevant 'developmental tasks'. And yet some writers suggest that the key feature of young people's experiences of bereavement is their relative powerlessness, rather than any particularities of cognition or affective responses. At the same time, the meanings that young people themselves attribute to their experiences may be crucial to any explanations of 'risk' for negative 'outcomes' that may be associated with bereavement. Furthermore, as exemplified by new case studies discussed in the paper, it is clear that young people are active agents in their family and peer group contexts. This article offers a discussion of bereavement in the context of 'youth' as a relational and institutionalised social status, and explores some theoretical issues potentially raised by the themes of death and bereavement in the context of youth studies generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]