Description of Activity
presentation: ‘Sarb katarb’ (the ledger) of life and death: a relational auto-ethnographic conversation reflecting on cultural and racialised histories and lived experiences. Sukhbinder Hamilton, and Jane Ribbens McCarthy This presentation contributes to emerging decolonising approaches challenging current individualised and medicalised framings of ‘bereavement’. Here we consider aspects of our on going collaboration working with our innovative methodology of sociologically informed auto-ethnographic conversations (Golding et al, in press; Hamilton et al, 2022). As Chang (2016:43) observes, autoethnography 'transcends mere narration of self to engage in cultural analysis and interpretation'. Drawing on our own complex, intersectional identities and family histories, we explore our experiences and emotive journeys with death and its aftermath, embedded as such experiences are in relational contexts and on-going lives (Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2023). As we seek to ‘make sense’ of our experiences, we reflect on our cultural histories as they are interwoven with colonialist legacies and dynamics of power and inequality. In this presentation we focus particularly on unexpected deaths, patterned as mortality is by inequality, and building on the theme of life and death’s ‘sarb katarb’. Cultural expectations and explanations offer differing rhetoric and resources for meaning-making in response to (multiple or otherwise unexpected) deaths, varying, for example, from ‘fate’, ‘cursed’, ‘God’s Will’, to the randomness of ‘the universe’. We explore such resonances as they arise from our auto-ethnographic conversations.| Period | 6 Jun 2024 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- bereavement
- Decolonising
- grief
- autoethnography