People
Jane McCarthy
Profile
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Jane Ribbens McCarthy is an honorary associate at The Open University, a visiting professor at the Centre for Death and Society at Bath University, and a visiting fellow at Reading University. Jane is a white English woman, living in South East England throughout her life, with a long ancestry of rural laborers who started to move into London in the late ninteenth century, and in time enjoyed some of the material benefits of the British Empire. She has worked on issues of death and "bereavement" since the death of her husband when their daughter was just 5, later broadening this to consider "Family Troubles" more generally. She has written with colleagues in China on children’s family lives and has been involved with researching family deaths in Senegal, West Africa. These collaborations have prompted her to broaden her writing and work in recent years towards decolonizing death and its aftermath, with multiple publications.