The Death Studies Podcast

What's the episode about?In this episode, get an overview of the 2025 Edited Collection Death and Institutions: Processes, Places and the Past  What is the Book About?Institutions play a crucial role in shaping experiences of end-of-life care, dying, death, body disposal and bereavement. However, there has been little holistic or multidisciplinary research in this area, with studies typically focusing on individual settings such as hospitals and cemeteries, or being confined to specific disciplines.This interdisciplinary collection combines chapters on process, place and the past to examine the relationships both within and between institutions, institutionalization and death in international contexts. Of broad appeal to students and academics in areas including social policy, health sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, history and the wider humanities, this collection spans multiple disciplines to offer crucial insights into the end of life, body disposal, bereavement and mourning. Introduction - Kate Woodthorpe, Helen Frisby and Bethan Michael-Fox 1. Culture as an Institution: Assessing Quality of Death in China - Chao Fang 2. The Market for Human Body Parts: Institutions,Intermediaries and Regulation - Lee Moerman and Sandra van der Laan 3. Secrecy, Judgement and Stigma: Assisted Dying inAotearoa New Zealand - Rhona Winnington 4.  Institutional Thoughtlessness: Prison as a Place forDying - Renske Visser 5. Out of the Ashes in New York City: Body StorageBottleneck in COVID-19's First Wave - Sally Raudon 6. Governing the Dead's Territory - Hajar Ghorbani 7.  'The Bluecoat Boys to Walk and Sing an Anthem before the Corpse': The Children of Christ's Hospital in London Funerals of the 18th Century - Dan O'Brien 8. Inside-Out and Outside-In: Learned Institutions andGarden Cemeteries in 19th-Century Britain - Lindsay Udall9. ‘They Attached No Blame to the Staff in Charge': TheRole of Dublin Workhouse Administration in Preventing and Contributing to Institutional Mortality, 1872–1913 - Shelby Zimmerman 10.  Tenets and Tensions: A Critical Exploration of the Death Positive Movement - Anna Wilde11.  Representations of Immortality and Institutions in 21st-Century Popular Culture - Devaleena Kundu and Bethan Michael-Fox 12. ‘I Was So Lost … and Who Brought You Back? Me.' - Deathstyle Gurus and the New Institutional Logics ofMourning on Instagram - Johanna Sumiala and Linda PentikäinenAfterword - Kate Woodthorpe, Helen Frisby and Bethan Michael-FoxWant to publish with Bristol University Press and the Death and Culture series? Find out more.How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation:  Woodthorpe, K., Frisby, H. and Michael-Fox, B. (2025) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R.Published 11 March 2025. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.28572215What next?Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

What's the episode about?In this episode, hear highlights from the 7th International Symposium of the Death Online Research Network (DORS#7) and Tamara Kneese on digital death, genAI, ethics, moving from academia to the private sector, data, society & collective actionWhat was DORS#7?The 7th International Symposium of the Death Online ResearchNetwork (DORS#7) on October 3rd–5th, 2024 was titled Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife. Hear soundbites and learn about the conference presentations and events in this episode! Who is Tamara?Dr. Tamara Kneese directs Data & Society Research Institute's Climate, Technology, and Justice program. Previously, she led Data & Society's Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab (AIMLab). Before joining D&S, she was lead researcher at Green Software Foundation, director of developer engagement on the Green Software team at Intel, and assistant professor of Media Studies and director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of ⁠Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism FailsUs in This Life and Beyond⁠ (Yale University Press, 2023).  Tamara holds a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU.⁠www.⁠⁠tamarakneese.com⁠ | ⁠@tamigraph.bsky.social⁠How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists?To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Kneese, T. (2025) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox,B. and Visser, R. Published 4 March 2025. Available at: ⁠www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com⁠, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.28531994 What next?Check out more ⁠episodes⁠ or find out more about the ⁠hosts! ⁠Got a question? ⁠Get in touch⁠.

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear Todd Meyers on grief, anthropology, entanglements, addiction, language, overdose death, opioid crisis, life’s incoherence and knowing your limits Who is Todd? Todd began his career as a painter, earning a BFA in studio from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His interests slowly moved to the history of medicine, public health, and anthropology, earning a PhD in anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University.    Todd began teaching in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill University in 2020, after previous appointments at New York University–Shanghai (2015-2020) and Wayne State University in Detroit (2009-2015).  He is currently Professor and Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine at McGill. In addition to his current book, Gone Gone (2025), Todd is the author and co-author of several other books, including All That Was Not Her (2022), which follows the life and death of a woman in Baltimore spanning twenty years, and The Human Body in the Age Catastrophe (2018, written with Stefanos Geroulanos), on the history of integration and disintegration in the study of human physiology at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Todd's current work is an ethnography of hate related violence and legal psychiatry told through the murder of a gay man over thirty years ago.   How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Meyers, T. (2025) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 February 2025. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.28327976 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

What's the episode about?   In this episode, hear Michele Aaron discuss filmmaking and end of life care, hospice documentary, death and LGBTQIA+ communities, palliative care, film practice, ethics and visual culture and dying Who is Michele?  Michele completed her BA in English Literature at Queen Mary’s (or QMW as it was then) and both my MA, (in Culture and Social Change) and PhD (in contemporary film and fiction) at the University of Southampton.   She joined Warwick in 2017 from the University of Birmingham where she was based from 2004 having previously taught at Brunel University.   In 2016-17, she was the principal investigator on the AHRC funded project ‘Digital Technology and Human Vulnerability: Towards an Ethical Praxis’. In 2019-20.   She was the principal investigator for the follow-on project 'Life:Moving Onwards: Ethical Praxis and the use of film in the International End of Life Community'.   She is the director/curator of Screening Rights Film Festival, the Midlands International Festival of Social Justice film and debate, which launched in 2015. How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Aaron, M. (2025) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 3 January 2025. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.28131629 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

What's the episode about?   In this episode, hear live recordings and interviews from the DEATHxDESIGNxCULTURE conference at Falmouth University in September 2024. The episode features discussion of death, culture, older age rational suicide (OARS), film, design, grief, knitting, jewellery and memento mori, material culture, museums, and memorial reefs   What was DEATHxDESIGNxCULTURE?  DEATHxDESIGNxCULTURE: Radical Re-Imagining for the End of Life brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers, practitioners, and designers to critically explore the role of design in relation to death and dying. With a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, the event facilitated knowledge exchange between experts in social sciences, the humanities, and various design fields.     Contributions came from a diverse range of areas, including graphic design, architecture, digital design, fashion design, and product design, highlighting the versatility and expansive nature of design in addressing issues of mortality.   The event was organised by Falmouth University senior lecturers Dr Robyn Cook, Nikki Salkeld and Ashley Rudolph in partnership with the Death and Culture Network at the University of York (UK), Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan (USA), and the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group at the University of Glasgow (UK). Nikki Salkeld and Ashley Rudolph, are the co-founders of MOTH, which started as a research project in 2013.  Find out more about the conference here. Find out more about Mortem Stores here. How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. (2024) Conference Episode of The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 December 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.27933669 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear Heidi Kosonen discuss representations of voluntary death suicide, posthumanism, planetary death, emotion, affect, disgust and gender Who is Heidi?  Heidi Kosonen is a postdoctoral researcher (Contemporary Culture) at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, with research expertise covering varied affective contemporary cultural phenomena. She defended her PhD on suicide cinema from the perspectives of taboo and biopower Fall 2020 and is currently focused on the question of planetary death in her personal post-doc. She has studied hate speech, toxic speech, and counterspeech on several research projects and has especially specialized in the performative use of disgust through the Disgust Network, which she co-founded. Her research connects affect studies approaches to social justice and taboo-related questions in contemporary culture. She is an editor-in-chief of Finnish gender studies journal Sukupuolentutkimus-Genusforskning and a vice chair of The Society for Cultural Studies in Finland. How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Kosonen, H. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published November 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.27434706 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

What's the episode about?   In this episode, hear Evie King discuss council funerals, being a funeral officer, the unidentified dead, Section 46, dying alone, rituals, respect for the dead, marginalisation and her book Ashes to Admin   Who is Evie?  Evie King is a council worker and writer. A former stand up comedian, she has always written short form pieces in the margins of her various day jobs, contributing to New Humanist, Guardian Comment is Free, BBC Comedy and Viz Comic. Since moving to the seaside and going part-time she has had more time for writing and has completed her first book - Ashes to Admin - about her job arranging council funerals under her pen name. She is currently working on a second.  The book mentioned in the introduction by podcast co-host Dr Renske Visser and the podcast’s first ever guest Professor Erica Borgstrom is https://www.routledge.com/Critical-Approaches-to-Death-Dying-and-Bereavement/Borgstrom-Visser/p/book/9781032330624?srsltid=AfmBOopYgRNL7SR_6NymBb-QPGhhEnc6sZ_weXcndNlIPb1VYDhar6gg. Discount code: SMA23 How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: King, E. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 October 2024. Available at: http://www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com/, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.27141447 What next? Check out more https://thedeathstudiespodcast.com/episodes/ or find out more about the https://thedeathstudiespodcast.com/the-hosts/ Got a question? https://thedeathstudiespodcast.com/contact-us/.

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear Dr. Minakshi Dewan on last rites and rituals in India, gender, faith, religion, funeral pyres, sky burial, caste, gender, discrimination and the professionalisation of rites and funerals Who is Minakshi? Dr Minakshi Dewan is a researcher and writer with a PhD degree in social medicine and community health from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a master's degree in social work from TISS Mumbai. She possesses extensive experience in health, gender, and community mobilization with grassroots and international development organizations. She has contributed chapters in academic publications on tribal health and healing rituals. Her writings have appeared in leading Indian and international publications and address a range of issues, including, health, human rights, the environment and culture. She has also written a non-fiction title for children. The Final Farewell: Understanding the Last Rites and Rituals of India’s Major Faiths, is her debut non-fiction book with Harper Collins, India.   How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Dewan, M. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 September 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.26886349 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear Professor Nina Lykke on queer and feminist death studies; posthumanism; the more than human; necropolitics; philosophy, atheism and death; vibrant death; mourning, and ongoing relationships with the dead  Who is Nina?  Nina Lykke, Dr. Phil., Professor Emerita, Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark. Nina participated in the building of Feminist Studies in Scandinavia and Europe more broadly for many years.  She is also a poet and writer, and co-founder, in 2016, of the international Network for Queer Death Studies.  Current research interests: queering of cancer, death, and mourning in posthuman, queerfemme, new-materialist, decolonial, eco-critical and spiritual-material perspectives; feminist and femme-inist theory; intersectional methodologies; autophenomenography; poetic writing; eco-critical storytelling.   She has recently published articles in journals such as Australian Feminist Studies; NORA; Catalyst; Environmental Humanities; Social Identities; Kerb Journal; Lambda Nordica; Forum+; Women, Gender and Research and Somatechnics. She is also author of numerous monographs such as Cosmodolphins (2000), Feminist Studies (2010), Vibrant Death (2022) and Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters (2024, with K.Aglert and L.Henrksen). How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Lykke, N. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 August 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.26422072  What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

Find out more at: https://deathxdesignxculture.info/ or follow the gram RADICAL RE-IMAGININGS FOR THE END OF LIFE  From 4-6 September, the Department of Graphic Design, Falmouth University (UK), and the Death and Culture Network, University of York (UK); in partnership with the Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan (USA), and the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group, University of Glasgow (UK) are hosting the DEATHxDESIGNxCULTURE: RADICAL RE-IMAGININGS FOR THE END OF LIFE conference.The conference seeks to open discursive space for ‘traditional’ as well as practice-based and practice-led research to critically reflect on the role of design as it relates to death, dying, and disposal at individual, community, and broader cultural levels, and to suggest radical alternatives for the future.  With a focus on interdisciplinarity, the conference aims to support knowledge exchange between researchers within the social sciences, the humanities, and design. Design is positioned as an expanded field inviting contributions from subject areas including, but not limited to: graphic design; multidisciplinary design; architecture; digital design; fashion design; and product design. A multi-modal approach will stretch the conventions of a conference format, incorporating experience design; exhibitions and pedagogic interventions; university-industry knowledge transfer; and opportunities for traditional academic papers.

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear Dr Hannah Gould on death and the dead in Japan, changing death rituals, necromaterials, death rites, caring for the dead, death technologies, vertical burial, material culture and ethnographies of things.  Who is Hannah?  Dr. Hannah Gould is a cultural anthropologist studying religion, materiality, death, and discarding with a regional focus in North-East Asia and Australia. In her words, “she studies the stuff of death and the death of stuff.” Dr. Gould has degrees from The University of Melbourne and Oxford University, and completed her doctoral research into the transformation of contemporary Japanese death ritual. Dr Gould currently serves as the President of The Australian Death Studies Society and holds the Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellowship for the project “Mobile Mortality: Transnational Futures of Deathcare in the Asia Pacific”. Dr Gould is also the author of When Death Falls Apart (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and co-editor of Aromas of Asia (Penn State University Press, 2023). Alongside academic research and publishing, she facilitates and engages in public and media-based conversations about death, dying, religion and technology, and is an advocate for more equitable systems of deathcare. The Book from this week’s Introduction Radical Mindfulness by James K. Rowe, Associate Professor at the School of Environmental Studies in the University of Victoria examines the root causes of injustice, asking why inequalities along the lines of race, class, gender, and species continue to exist. Specifically, James Rowe examines fear of death as a root cause of systemic inequalities and proposes a more embodied approach to social change as a solution. How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Gould, H. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 July 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.26139067 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear Dr Juliet Hooker discuss her book Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss, language and social justice, democracy, and killings by the police in the US Who is Juliet?  Juliet Hooker is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University, where she teaches courses on racial justice, Black political thought, Latin American political thought, democratic theory, and contemporary political theory. Before coming to Brown, she was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of multiple award-winning books, including Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009), Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017), Black Grief/White Grievance: The Politics of Loss (Princeton, 2023), and editor of Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash (Lexington Books, 2020). Theorizing Race in the Americas was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section. Black Grief/White Grievance was named a Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Social Science Book of the Year, and a finalist for the PROSE Award in Government and Politics from the Association of American Publishers in 2023. Find out more about Juliet at https://juliethooker.com/ How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Hooker, J. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 June 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.25941190 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

In this episode, hear Yasmin Gunaratnam discuss transnational dying and end-of-life care in cities, ethnography, being a carer, writing, education with end-of-life-care professionals, artful risky care, using art methods in social sciences research, palliative art, hospitality, migration and death, an anti-colonial death studies and climate crisis, the genocide in Gaza, yoga, and being an academic with ADHD Who is Yasmin?  Yasmin Gunaratnam is a sociologist interested in how different types of inequality and injustice are produced, lived with and remade and how these processes create new forms of local and global inclusion and dispossession.  Yasmin is also a yoga teacher, exploring contemplative social justice and embodied pedagogies. Her publications include 'Researching Race and Ethnicity: methods, knowledge and power' (2003, Sage), ‘Death and the Migrant’ (2013, Bloomsbury Academic) and the co-authored book ‘Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies’ (2017, Manchester University Press). She tweets @YasminGun The Book in the Introduction The book introduced in this episode is Youth and Suicide in American Cinema: Context, Causes, and Consequences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) by Alessandra Seggi, MA, PhD, Fulbright Scholar and  faculty at Villanova University, Department of Sociology and Criminology. Find out more at: https://www.alessandraseggi.com/ How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Gunaratnam, Y. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 2 May 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.25735434 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear M.F. (Mike) Alvarez on suicide, mental health and illness, autoethnography, fine art, reflexive writing, creative writing, interdisciplinarity and biases in the academy  Who is M.F. Alvarez?  M. F.  (Mike) Alvarez is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, USA. He is the author of two books: The Paradox of Suicide and Creativity (Lexington Books, 2020), and Unraveling: An Autoethnography of Suicide and Renewal (Routledge, 2023). He is also lead author of A Plague for Our Time: Dying and Death in the Age of COVID-19 (McFarland, forthcoming), and lead editor of Suicide in Popular Media and Culture (Bristol UP, in progress). Dr. Alvarez is a founding member of the National Communication Association’s Death and Dying Division. He teaches courses in mental health communication, end of life communication, film and media studies, and autoethnography. How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Alvarez. M. F. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 April 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.25516474 What next? Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.

What's the episode about? In this episode, hear author and vocal coach Clare Hogan discuss death anxiety, breath work, transpersonal psychology, performing death, death cafes and seeing death as an adventure and gateway to more life.   Who is Clare? After completing her GMus at the Royal Northern College of Music, Clare went on to do a Masters by Research at Keele University.  It was there that she discovered an interest in psychology.   Whilst still researching for her MA, Clare started tutoring at Keele and later at Salford University. Clare devised and has run the Master's course 'Psychology of Performance' at Salford for over 20 years. ​Clare is an expert in classical and operatic technique and has a keen interest in helping those suffering from anxiety and/or stage-fright.   Her latest book, Performance and Purpose in Death and Dying, was written over three years in response to the growing need for a sense of purpose in the wake of so much destruction and devastation, with the aim of communicating the message that there is no death as we commonly perceive it, and there is nothing to fear.   It developed and grew from the courses, classes and the Death Cafes that Clare has delivered and facilitated. The Alchemy of Performance Anxiety: Transformation for Artists was published in 2018, also by Free Association Books. How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists? To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Hogan, C. (2024) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 4 March 2024. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.25334869 What next? Checkout more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Got a question? Get in touch.