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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.

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]

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]