Embedded Files
with Kate Woodthorpe (University of Bath), a past co-convenor of the group, we have noticed that reflections about methods and methodology (as topics in their own right), reoccur every year in presentations at the symposium, regardless of the substantive theme stipulated as the focus for the day (e.g. death and family, death and social difference, etc.). In particular, we have observed participants sharing their experiences of doing research and exploring the implications – both personal and professional – of being a ‘death researcher’. Attendees regularly share experiential and personal insights on a range of issues, including: the procedural and inter-personal nature of research ethics; attending to and coping with grief during their work; managing gatekeepers and recruitment; and negotiating particular challenges due to the (perceived and actual) ‘sensitive’ nature of their research and the ‘vulnerability’ of the populations being researched. Recognising the apparent need and desire to have a space for these kinds of conversations, we dedicated an entire symposium in November 2015 to the topic of methodology and research reflections. Symposium abstracts were initially solicited, and later a wider call beyond the DDB group was made for extended paper outlines for the current special issue. We received over 40 submissions from around the world that spanned different disciplines. The selection of five articles was based on the ability of each proposed paper to make a specific methodological contribution. It was important that the authors had a clear view of how they would address the mandate of the special issue – to not only describe research practices, but also to think about the consequences of how doing research in particular ways reflects methodological, epistemological and personal positions; to think through the interrelationship between research, reflexivity and the kinds of knowledges produced. Moreover, we selected a range of articles that we felt could stimulate dialogue about future empirical directions in the field and which promised to draw out specific issues of particular relevance for being a death researcher. Having said all this, we do acknowledge that this issue alone cannot reflect the disciplinary and methodological diversity of death studies. The potential scope invited by a call related to method is obviously vast, and we acknowledge that in selecting a particular collection of papers we have addressed some methodological issues, and inevitably neglected others. Perhaps most notably, the special issue does not adequately consider the implications for death studies of three key contemporary methodological developments. Firstly, there is an absence of papers dealing with quantitative research and using ‘big data’ specifically (see Davies et al., 2016). This reflects a limited interest in quantitative methods amongst the abstracts received. Secondly, the papers do not address ethical and practical issues involved in using online methods when doing death research (see Carmack & Degroot, 2014; Giaxoglou, 2016). Whilst thirdly, the ‘sensory’ turn evident particularly in the social sciences (Mason & Davies, 2009) is only partly attended to in Scott Bray’s paper focusing on the visual. These are clearly areas where future death studies methods publications can make a contribution. Nonetheless, this special issue offers a place to instigate more sustained methodological dialogue in the field. It is a platform to encourage other accounts that focus explicitly on the doing of death research, and in particular, the relationship between how research is done and experienced, the kinds of knowledges it produces and the social impacts it can have. To begin the special issue, Candi Cann and John Troyer’s paper offers an especially novel contribution. Comparative, cross-cultural work is limited in death studies (Walter, 2005), whilst national, sociocultural factors that have shaped the methodological genealogy of the field, remain particularly under-scrutinised. The authors address both these issues in an ambitious paper that pushes at the perimeters of how ‘methodology’ is conventionally defined and understood. With a macro focus on how approaches to ‘managing’ death differ between the US and the UK, Cann and Troyer ‘position methodologies as a series of concepts, as well as practices, that articulate different conditions of possibility’ for death-related research in each national context (p. 106). By examining key sites where divergent discursive approaches to death are (re)produced and enacted (e.g. pedagogically in death education and financially in research and health care funding), the paper aims to open up conversations about how to generate new and integrated approaches that can benefit both countries. Ultimately, Cann and Troyer argue that the UK’s more transdisciplinary, collaborative methodologies create better ‘conditions of possibility’ for research to impact death education, knowledge generation and policy-making. The challenge this paper poses for researchers across the two nations is to (re)find points of convergence vis-a-vis their shared history in death studies; to generate ‘a new kind of methodological approach’ (p. 112) that facilitates greater trans-Atlantic dialogue on death-related issues such as policy, education and end-of-life care, which will benefit citizens in both countries and
Report abuse