Laura Towers Editor

Sharon Mallon is a Senior Lecturer in Mental Health at the University of Staffordshire, UK. She is an experienced qualitative researcher who specialises in projects focused on bereavement and mental health, particularly suicide postvention and prevention, the gendered, social approaches to understanding death by suicide, and the wider impact of suicide bereavement on different bereaved groups. She has also developed a strong interest in the emotional impact of researching sensitive subjects on researchers. She was awarded her PhD for a qualitative study of young adults’ suicides from the perspective of their friends. She is co-editor of Preventing and Responding to Student Suicide: A Practical Guide for FE and HE Settings (2021), Narratives of COVID: Loss, Dying, Death and Grief during COVID-19 (2021), and Unpacking Sensitive Research: Epistemological and Methodological Implications (Routledge, 2022).

Laura Towers is a Research Associate in the Sheffield Methods Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK. Laura’s research interests include exploring the complexity of negotiating changing relationships and identities within the context of grief and bereavement, such as following the loss of a sibling. She is currently working with Professor Kate Reed on bereavement-focused research and with Hospice UK on people’s experiences at work when caring for a dying relative. She was co-convenor of the British Sociological Association’s Social Aspects of Death, Dying and Bereavement Study Group between 2017 and 2022.