Dr Jane McCarthy on grief, bereavement, family relationships, relationality, children, young people and death, decolonising death studies, climate emergency and more
Who is Jane? Jane McCarthy is an English sociologist who has worked for many decades across various disciplines to focuson ‘family’, childhood, and relationality. In the last 25 years,since the death of her husband when their daughter was aged 5, she has built on this earlier work to explore death and its continuing aftermath in the everyday relational lives of the living, alongside ‘family troubles’ more broadly. She has approached these topics in terms of lived experiences, academic approaches, and professional practices and services. She has particularly offered a view of bereavement as a source of change, rather than the narrower view of ‘loss’, including in the lives of children experiencing a significant death in their lives. Her general approach to all these subjects is to set aside what may be considered ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, ‘harmful’ or ‘beneficial’, and rather to focus on how disruptive change may be experienced in everyday relational lives, with multiple ramifications, and how people themselves make sense of these within the circumstances of their lives. Some of Jane’s work has involved research and collaborations in Senegal and China, but her primary experience is UK based, where she has particularly valued her involvement with the Community Voices network. Since her ‘retirement’ in 2015, as an Honorary Associate at The Open University she has been able to extend this work to initiate an Open Societal Challenge on Existential Dis/Connections. This collaborative interdisciplinary hub seeks a decolonising lens to explore how existential threats are structurally shaped, as well as personally experienced and understood, in the era of modernity/coloniality, with its many forms of disconnect, including the ‘Othering’ of racialised capitalism. The work particularly highlights the dis/connections of existential threats of personal deaths, on the one hand, and the planetary existential threats rapidly (but unequally) emerging with the Climate and Ecological Emergency on the other. A ‘decolonising’ lens is therefore sought to explore dis/connections of many forms and through many means in regard to these concerns. The collaboration seeks a polyphonic approach with an emphasis on both ‘being’ and ‘doing’, towards both epistemological and ontological/cosmological justice. These issues require attention to the taken-for-granted Whiteness of knowledge in relation to death and its aftermath alongside the power and oppressions of necropolitics, in the era of modernity/coloniality. In the podcast, in conversation with Bethan Michael-Fox, Jane explores some of the twists and turns of her life journey across these terrains over 40 years. ***In the podcast Jane refers to a proverb: "I am because we are one". She has since clarified that this should just be: "I am because we are". She notes that this is an error risking appropriating the proverb by adding her own meaning when the actual wording of the proverb is in any case strikingly powerful in its original form. She is aware that 'ubuntu' is a pervasive and complex philosophy that relates to many aspects of life.** Besides her position at The Open University, Jane is a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Death and Society at Bath University, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Reading. She publishes extensively on these topics as Jane Ribbens McCarthy. Demystifying Death Documentary For anyone interested in the Demystifying Death event in India in January, please contact Mariya directly on makaragy@gmail.com To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: McCarthy, J. (2026) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 2 October 2026. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.34056750
