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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 propinguity, material-emotional responses, and diverse meanings of ‘family’, ‘home’ and belonging in the context of troubling changes in family lives, intergenerational relations and practices of care. We seek to establish an agenda for future geographical work and interdisciplinary dialogue on ‘family troubles’, vulnerabilities and social suffering in contexts of (troubling) changes and diversity. Such analyses are crucial in our efforts to envision a more relational understanding of our ‘being-in-the-world’, underpinned by care ethics and support for differentially positioned family members throughout the lifecourse and across generations.

This thesis addresses how Japanese university-educated mothers in a suburban context make the most of their lives. The chief focus is a group of women who have chosen not to pursue a career outside the home. The expansion of numbers of university-educated women in post-war Japan has not made a great impact on the pattern of women's labour force participation as a whole. The majority of university graduate women enter employment immediately after graduation, but once they leave the workplace, especially on child-birth, they tend not to return to work afterwards, while women from a lower educational background are more likely to do so after their children grow up. I attempt to show how women's and mothers' multiple roles in both the public and the domestic spheres, are related to an exclusion of university-educated mothers from working outside the home. Firstly, university-educated women have received contradictory messages from society. Although university education is regarded as a key to access a privileged social position and professional success, educators have not necessarily encouraged female students to pursue a long-term career. Rather, for women, they have stressed developing their 'special talent', i.e. motherhood. Moreover, the field of employment has not been in favour of hiring university graduate women. In many Japanese firms, university graduate men are placed on a managerial track and women are automatically classified in a group of assistant workers. University graduate women who pursue a managerial career are therefore in an anomalous position. Secondly, mothers are treated in the same way in society irrespective of educational attainments. University-educated mothers have less interest in working outside again, because they well know the fact that almost all the paid work available to mothers is so-called 'housewife's part-time work', which does not require any special skills or abilities. In addition, socialisation of compliant mothers is one of t

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.

This chapter examines the ways in which policy agendas and contemporary notions of the ‘good mother’ frame infant feeding practices, rendering them a site of moral and interactional trouble for mothers. Drawing on analysis of mothers’ talk with midwives during the first days of motherhood, the chapter explores the ways in which breastfeeding confers a positive maternal identity whilst choosing not to do so is associated with a deficit identity against which mothers’ struggle to present themselves as good parents. The chapter suggests that these encounters are important places to explore the ways in which ‘ordinary’ family practices are troubled by policy agendas which may conflict with women’s embodied experiences, culturally held ideas about feeding babies and contemporary notions about what constitutes a good mother and a healthy baby. A focus on these signal moments makes visible the ways in which policy agendas may negate the rich texture of maternal labour and its complex and troubling relationship with policy.

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 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.

Introduction to the special section on 'Troubling Families'.

In this chapter we bring into focus those aspects of family lives in China that are concerned with children’s family relationships, and the ways in which such issues are part and parcel of the broader institutionalisation of childhood. We draw on theoretical frameworks in the sociology of childhood and childhood studies (e.g., Prout, 2004; Qvortrup, 2000; Smith and Greene, 2014). Since these theoretical perspectives have developed predominantly in Anglophone literature, some researchers have considered their relevance to, and utility for, China and Chinese childhoods (Goh, 2011; Miao, 2013; Wang YY, 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Zheng, 2012a, 2012b; Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2017). In engaging with existing theories, and applying them to, Chinese children’s family lives, we seek to go beyond any tendency to just ‘add in the missing children’ to existing discussions (Kesby et al., 2006: 186), and give consideration to a variety of cultural and local contexts that characterise China and illuminate why it is necessary to decentre universalist thinking (Jullien, 2008/2014)

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.

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.

Abstract 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. Résumé Cet article reflète les complexités profondes de la traduction et de l’interprétation du ‘chagrin’, des émotions et des réponses face à un décès d’une manière générale, dans des contextes multilingues et interculturels. En nous appuyant sur une recherche qualitative menée dans le Sénégal urbain, Afrique de l’Ouest, nous discutons des échanges de significations qui entourent le chagrin et la mort à travers la langue, incluant le processus de traduction, dans son se

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.

The central concern of this paper is that there has been a move within British 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 engagement with policy developments and professional practices that focus on ‘family’ as a core, institutionalised, idea. While repudiating the necessity (and indeed, pointing out the dangers) of providing any definitive answer to definitions of ‘family’, the paper calls for critical reflection on the implications of these conceptual moves.

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 ideas further through globally relevant but variable cultural themes of autonomy and relationality, suggesting the term ‘social person’ as a heuristic device to distinguish the sense of ‘close-knit selves’ that may be involved in some understandings of personhood. I argue that this version of personhood may be powerfully expressed through ‘family’ meanings, with a significance which can be at least provisionally mapped along lines of inequality and dis-advantage within and between societies around the world. These forms of connectedness may be hard to grasp through those theoretical and methodological frameworks which emphasise the (relational) individual. I argue that, in affluent English speaking societies , there may be little alternative to the language of ‘family’ for expressing such forms of relationality and connection.

Taken from the book to be published by Sage in December 2010, this document provides the Introduction to the book, in which the authors discuss issues in Family Studies as a contemporary field of academic and professional work. Their discussion includes: some of the different positions adopted by researchers towards the use of the language of 'family'; the broad themes generally included in this field of study; and dilemmas in evaluations of, and interventions in, family lives.

We explore contested meanings around care and relationality through the underexplored 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 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.

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.

This article draws on multi-disciplinary 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 re-frame 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 UK. 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 (Jullien, 2008/2014). 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 Jullien (2008/2014) to recognize the immense complexities inter-cultural dialogue e

Death most fundamentally would seem to concern the absence of presence, and the loss of the living embodied other is the apparently hard inescapable truth to be faced. This brings sharply into relief the part that bodies play in our relationships and in caring for others. In this chapter I explore the significance of the absence and presence of material bodies for care practices, and for the understandings of relationality that may underpin caring after death. At the same time I also consider the bodies of the living and the ways in which grief and loss may be experienced as physical pain in one's own body. Drawing on published autobiographical materials, I suggest that the relationality of caring - even in contemporary US and European societies - may incorporate an embodied relational self in which threats to the physical wellbeing of another may be experienced directly as implicating one's own physical wellbeing. Such 'embodied relationality' highlights one of the deep paradoxes in the costs and benefits of care, which arise when we recognise how individual well-being and flourishing may be bound up with that of others.

Introduction to the special section on 'Troubling Families'.

In this chapter we bring into focus those aspects of family lives in China that are concerned with children’s family relationships, and the ways in which such issues are part and parcel of the broader institutionalisation of childhood. We draw on theoretical frameworks in the sociology of childhood and childhood studies (e.g., Prout, 2004; Qvortrup, 2000; Smith and Greene, 2014). Since these theoretical perspectives have developed predominantly in Anglophone literature, some researchers have considered their relevance to, and utility for, China and Chinese childhoods (Goh, 2011; Miao, 2013; Wang YY, 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Zheng, 2012a, 2012b; Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2017). In engaging with existing theories, and applying them to, Chinese children’s family lives, we seek to go beyond any tendency to just ‘add in the missing children’ to existing discussions (Kesby et al., 2006: 186), and give consideration to a variety of cultural and local contexts that characterise China and illuminate why it is necessary to decentre universalist thinking (Jullien, 2008/2014)