Situating Ethics in Online Mourning Research: A Scoping Review of Empirical Studies

In the past decade, social media have put mourning practices at the forefront of daily life in ways that challenge assumptions made about the public disclosure of information often construed as being highly intimate. This article examines how researchers conceive online mourning in empirical studies and how such conceptions inform (or not) methodological and ethical decisions. Through a scoping review, we identified 40 empirical papers addressing online mourning. Our analysis shows that, while online mourning practices have overwhelmingly been problematized in terms of privacy and publicness within the current literature, ethical issues relating to their analysis have been scarcely addressed in empirical research. In line with Foucault’s work on the dispositif, we then examine the performative role of privacy and data sensitivity in the context of online mourning research (notably in relation to consent procurement) and discuss our findings in light of emerging trends in context-based ethics.