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There has been much work highlighting the benefits of autoethnographic research yet little acknowledgement of the demands researching your own life makes on the emotional and mental wellbeing of the researcher. This paper explores the consequences that can arise as a result of autoethnographic research by detailing the crises involved in researching a topic that the researcher has experienced herself. This paper discusses the re-emergence of my grief over the death of my mother as I researched into the experience of other young women who had experienced the death of their mother during their youth. The research process was a journey in which crises were experienced that conflicted and illuminated the emerging findings of the research. The role of the researcher and the researcher's subjectivity--emotions, feelings, actions--are highlighted as integral to research practice. Accepting vulnerability and problematic feelings and emotions can be seen both as an important part of grieving the loss of a mother but also a significant step in conducting research and being a researcher.

This paper addresses the complex issue of the embodiment of grief. It explores how a theoretical shift to the body has influenced scholarly literature about grief and bereavement. Despite this shift, we argue that bodily interpretations and experiences are undertheorised in western psychological literature on bereavement. Specifically, we argue that linear stage models of grief have encouraged the view that grief needs 'working through' in the mind, and not necessarily the body. We draw on empirical data from interviews with bereaved people undertaken in England to illustrate aspects of the embodied experience of grief that differ from how psychological grief theories conceive of the bereaved person's body. Findings highlight the role of the bereaved person's body in managing grief and how the absence and continuing presence of the deceased person is managed through embodied practices. We conclude that understanding grief as an embodied experience can enable the development of grief theories that better capture the complex negotiation between the psychological processes of grief and the materiality of bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health researchers are encouraged to involve patients and the public in each stage of the research process. Patient and public involvement (PPI) seeks to redress an apparent 'democratic deficit' in the production of health research. While many claims have been made of the benefits of involving and increasingly co-producing research with patient and public members, it has proven difficult to measure its impact. To inform understanding of why involvement initiatives 'fail' or 'succeed', this paper focuses on the relational dynamics of PPI and co-production. Through an examination of the discourse of relationships in UK health research guidance it is argued that while emphasis is placed on 'sharing power', there persists limited understanding of the constraints of institutional structures and how power asymmetries come to be performed, reinforced or resisted in PPI and co-production settings. To reshape and rethink existing practices I examine the theories that underlie PPI and co-production referring to Habermas' (The theory of communicative action, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987) and Mouffe's (Social Research 66:745–758, 1999; Politica Comun, https://doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0009.011, 2016) contrasting perspectives on the role of public participation in democratic designs. I suggest that power differentials cannot simply be eradicated or bracketed by guidelines and rhetoric, and that PPI and co-production must be understood as profoundly relational and interactional processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]