Producing emotionally sensed knowledge? Reflexivity and emotions in researching responses to death

Abstract

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:

• Bereavement and responses to death
• emotions in research
• reflexivity and positionality
• feminist ethic of care
• meanings of ‘family’
• Senegal, West Africa

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all the family members, religious and local leaders and professionals who participated in this study. We are very grateful to Della Reilly, Ivor Placca and Laurence Marie for their translation assistance and to Khady Sarr, Yacine Diagne, Bineta Sarr, Binetou Diagne, Amy Libin Toure for their assistance in facilitating the research. We also thank members of the UK and Senegal Advisory Groups. We are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding this research project, Death in the Family in Urban Senegal: bereavement, care and family relations. We also thank those with whom we have discussed our ideas at conferences and seminars, in addition to the editor and anonymous reviewers who have helped to improve the article.

Notes

1. A shorter version of this paper was originally presented at Making Sense of Suffering, Dying and Death Interdisciplinary.net Conference Prague, Czech Republic, 1–3 November 2014.

2. We recognise that understandings of ‘family’ are culturally variable and highly contested, which has led to various perspectives on how to theorise and study families (Ribbens McCarthy and Edwards, 2010; Oheneba-Sakyi & Takyi, 2006).

3. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss in more depth the concept of 'emotion' theoretically or philosophically.

4. Research project, Death in the Family in Urban Senegal: bereavement, care and family relations (2014–16). See http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/deathinthefamilyinsenegal/ and Evans et al. (2016) for more information.

5. See our blog for interview topic guide: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/deathinthefamilyinsenegal/files/2014/02/Interview-topic-guide-for-adults.pdf

6. We use the terms Majority and Minority Worlds to refer to the global South and global North respectively, following Punch’s (2003) argument among others that we need to shift the balance of world views that frequently privilege ‘western’ and ‘northern’ populations and issues. The terms acknowledge that the ‘majority’ of the world's population, poverty, land mass and so on are located in the global South.

7. This difficult question raises many broad ranging issues about research ethics, including the implications for future researchers, that are beyond the scope of our present discussion. As previously noted, we adopted a contextual ethic of care.

8. Our original plans for Jane and Sophie to participate in the dissemination phase in Senegal were not possible.

9. Bondi (2014) among others suggests that psychoanalytical ideas about unconscious communication can help to make sense of emotional dimensions of research interviews and the narratives they generate, but we have not adopted this approach in our interpretation of the data.