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death studies internationally. As is apparent in Cann and Troyer’s article, Anglophone perspectives dominate conceptual and empirical scholarship in death studies. The ethical and epistemological issues this engenders are critically examined in the next paper by Ruth Evans and colleagues as they problematise the lack of empirical work exploring Majority world perspectives. They argue that scholars must recognise the limitations and cultural specificity of conceptual frameworks about death developed mostly in (Minority) European contexts. In their reflexive contribution to the special issue, the need for more comparative and culturally diverse accounts of death-related experiences is identified, as are some of the methodological challenges that addressing this gap would present. Describing experiences of participating in a multilingual project about grief and responses to death within families in urban Senegal, the focus of this paper is on translation and the pragmatic and epistemological complexities involved in working with research data in multiple languages. As the authors state, the cultural nuance of language can significantly affect the analysis process and ultimately the production of knowledge, and yet this is so often glossed over in research outputs. Therefore, Evans et al. offer an important addition to the methods literature on doing death research (and multilingual research in general) by stressing the significance of this epistemological issue. Providing insights that promise to enhance methodological capabilities within the field, the authors give practical advice on how to manage interpretation and translation issues, referring to illustrative examples about interviewing and transcription based on their own research experience. Whilst the pragmatics of how to do this kind of research remain a central part of the paper, the epistemological and ethical ramifications of the inherent interplay between language, meaning and power in the context of doing research, are also judiciously impressed on the reader. This is also the case in Rebecca Scott Bray’s paper, which explores a myriad of ethical issues related to the scholarly (and artistic) use of criminal evidence for ‘extra-legal’ purposes such as research. In this paper, she refers specifically to images of fatal violence (e.g. forensic crime scene pictures) and considers the complex tensions and challenges involved for researchers who encounter these images, use them as data, and further reproduce them in the dissemination of their academic work. A key question posed is how scholars engaged in visual work can/should bear witness to pain and trauma, and represent their findings about violent death to others. Thus, at the heart of her paper, Scott Bray, like Evans et al., also deals with matters of ‘translation’ and their epistemological possibilities. To think through these issues she asks whether as researchers we can ‘take clues from aesthetic practices in how we might wrestle with the challenge of researching death’s pictures’ (p. 138) and offers examples from the art world that may provide useful frameworks for researchers to ‘move from exposed to exposure with careful concern’ (p. 146). The critique has often been levelled within death studies that the diversity of dying experience is not adequately reflected in the work produced (Kellehear, 2009). Scott Bray makes an important contribution in her paper here with a deeply reflective and thorough examination of if/how knowledge created about a marginalised death experience (murder) can be communicated sensitively and responsibly to research audiences, both academic and public. The concern in this article, then, is with visual methods – again, something relatively underexplored in death studies. It describes the ‘cultural turn’ in legal and criminological scholarship that, Scott Bray argues, has developed without the necessary ‘visual competence’ to manage the material with which it engages. The methodological contribution of the work therefore extends beyond death studies and informs debates within cultural criminology (and the field of ‘visual methods’ more broadly). In particular, it raises important questions about researcher well-being when working with ‘disturbing’ material where, as the author points out, the focus to date has been limited mainly to methods of primary data collection (e.g. interviews and observation). Whilst Scott Bray’s principal focus is on how to establish – through dissemination practices – an ‘appropriate’ closeness between research material and those that encounter/consume it, in Michael Brennan and Gayle Letherby’s contribution to the special issue it is the death researcher’s own personal proximity to what is being researched that is reflected upon. As researchers who have both used autobiographical and biographical methods to study death, dying, and bereavement, the authors argue that these epistemological approaches exist on a continuum, where the relative focus on self or other(s) in a piece of work often entails ‘slippage’. In other words, autobiographical or biographical writing can interweave as these are rarely clear-cut and demarcated approaches. In the article, they provide examples from their own death-related research to illustrate these connecting and contrasting permutations in this methodological approach. Refuting the accusation that these methods are self-
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