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recognise that scholarly activity in the field of death studies – an umbrella term for research spanning all aspects of death, dying and bereavement, including end-of-life care – is growing in popularity. Since we completed our PhDs (less than 7 years ago), the number of UK universities offering courses on death-related topics has increased, mailing lists and online chat groups have multiplied, and the range of international seminars and conferences addressing topics in the field is expanding. This mounting interest in death studies makes this an opportune time to consider the methodological issues that doing research on death, dying and bereavement present.Mortality is a flagship journal in this interdisciplinary field. Read by both academics and practitioners, and with an increasingly international authorship and audience, it is an ideal space to consider contemporary methodological issues and challenges. As editors of this special issue, we have brought together a range of articles written by researchers which foreground and explore in detail matters pertaining to the study of death. As a collection, the articles seek to generate discussion about techniques, practices and sociocultural contexts of death research, and the implications that these have for knowledge production. Moreover, they intend to stimulate reflection on what is particular about engaging in death-related research specifically – teasing out key issues from more generic ongoing discussions about doing ‘sensitive’ (usually qualitative) research. In doing so, they offer practical tips and guidance – with the authors including key points and summary boxes at the end of each article. By placing these articles together and in dialogue with one another, we hope to encourage further substantive publications that deal with methodological aspects of death research, and that can continue these conversations. If we look at the genealogy of death studies (in English-speaking nations at least), there is a history of key periods of academic reflection and activity. For example, in the late 1960s and early 1970s (in the United States in particular), we saw a plethora of research in the field which produced seminal works that are still regularly cited in research, teaching and professional education today (e.g. Glaser & Strauss, 1965; Kubler-Ross, 1969). In the 1990s, many important theoretical (e.g. Mellor & Shilling, 1993; Walter, 1994) and empirical (e.g. Hockey, 1990; Howarth, 1996; Young & Cullen, 1996) texts where published along with a number of edited collections (e.g. Clark, 1993; Klass, Silverman, & Nickman, 1996). Now, in the 2010s, we have several further diverse and novel contributions to the field, (e.g. Cann, 2014; Christensen & Willerslev, 2013; Foster & Woodthorpe, 2016; Kellehear, 2014). And yet, despite this established and continually expanding body of work, there are very few substantive publications devoted solely to methodological issues in death studies research (Woodthorpe, 2009). Likewise, although researchers are often required to justify why one would ‘choose’ to work in the (‘morbid’) field of death and dying (Hockey, 2007), there is little in the literature which reflects on matters of identity vis-a-vis doing death research. This special issue, therefore represents, a rare opportunity to pay extended and explicit attention to what is particular about doing research on the end of life and being a contemporary ‘death researcher’. Whilst death studies is a multi-disciplinary field, it is often the case that those undertaking research in the area look to published work within their own disciplines for methodological guidance. Informal conversations with current doctoral students confirmed our suspicions that less generic methodological texts devoted to issues particular to death research would be a welcome addition to the field. Nonetheless, we do not suggest that any such publications would be starting from a blank canvas, or that the existing more general literatures – particularly about doing sensitive research – are not relevant and helpful. They definitely are, and therefore it is important to acknowledge what has been published and to note (however briefly) certain key issues that have been considered as a way to provide some context for the special issue. For, despite a lack of ‘go to’ textbooks or volumes that deal explicitly with the methodological and practical aspects of researching death, dying and bereavement, there have been a few important accounts published (more so in recent years) that reflect on issues specific to doing death research. These usually appear as stand-alone chapters or articles drawing on experiences from a particular research project (e.g. Howarth, 1993; Rolls & Relf, 2006; Valentine, 2007; Woodthorpe, 2011 ) or consider concerns pertinent to a specific sub-field such as suicide research (e.g. Boden, Gibson, Owen, & Benson,2016; McKenzie, Li, Jenkin, & Collings, 2016). It is more unusual for authors to attempt broader reflexive exploration of methodological matters, which muse on possible motivations for studying death-related topics and the wider cultural and social contexts or research environments within which one’s identity and experiences as a ‘death researcher’ are located (see Hockey, 2007, 2014 for interesting exceptions and (Cann & Troyer, 2017) as well as Evans, Ribbens McCarthy, Kébé,
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