Our paper at the Emotional Geographies conference

Ruth recently presented a paper, ‘”Your tears are like pouring hot water on the body”: exploring religious and cultural influences on responses to death in urban Senegal’ in the Geographies of Faith, Spirituality and Religion session (organised by Claire Dwyer, Ruth Judge and Elizabeth Olsen) at the 5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies. The paper focused on tears and the expression of emotions in responses to death in the family in urban Senegal, based on our preliminary findings. We also sought to interrogate our cultural assumptions about religious and cultural norms surrounding mourning and the expression of grief. We found it helpful to analyse our findings through the framings of emotional geographies and geographies of religion and received thoughtful questions and comments from colleagues.

Our paper at the CDAS conference

Jane recently presented a paper, ‘Death and its futures beyond the global North: exploring responses to family deaths in urban Senegal’ at the Centre for Death and Society Conference. The paper drew on our preliminary analyses of the data and discussed how responses to death are embedded in cultural understandings of family relationships. It was great to share our findings with death and bereavement studies scholars and practitioners and receive helpful comments and feedback.