ABSTRACT Access to palliative care and end-of-life care is a recognised human right. Disparities in accessing palliative care are known to exist. There have been recent attempts to understand the unique and variable understandings of palliative care and end-of-life care from different cultural perspectives. This research aimed to explore concepts of palliative care from a Cook Islands Māori perspective in New Zealand. Using a constructivist grounded theory methodology and the Tivaevae model 28 participants, were interviewed. The findings revealed key concepts, namely: palliative care is a spiritual journey in which spirituality is omnipresent; the kopu tangata (family inclusive of the ancestors) are a vital component of palliative care and experience their own life course transition during the palliative care journey. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to develop a model of Cook Islands Māori palliative care. This model can provide understanding and guidance to clinicians. It contributes to the limited body of knowledge on cultural understandings of palliative and end of life care but specifically describes various adaptions that can be applied in New Zealand.

ABSTRACT Representations of the Western cannibal have metamorphosed since Herodotus first recorded the practice of anthropophagy. These images of the cannibal have been intefrtwined with philosophical, religious and metaphorical representations, far removed from the indigenous interpretations of ritual anthropophagic practices. In this paper, we examine the imaginary cannibal of Western discourse and then compare Western medicinal cannibalism and the Catholic Eucharist with the mortuary anthropophagy of the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea. This comparison revealed underlying similarities in their beliefs of immortal essences which could be transferred from the dead to the living to ward off the inevitability of death. These findings removed long-established racist boundaries between indigenous anthropophagi and Western observers.

ABSTRACT Funeral directors play an important role in supporting their community through difficult transitions and loss. Yet these caregivers are often overlooked both in the research and when they seek support for their own mental health and well-being . This qualitative analysis aims to create foundational knowledge of the mental health experiences and stigmas facing funeral directors using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with six funeral directors in Ontario. Data was analysed using thematic analysis . Five major themes were generated from the interviews. In relation to mental health, funeral directors noted poor treatment and trauma in the workplace, stress and burnout, and a lack of targeted mental health supports. Regarding stigma, they noted an ignorance in the general population about their work and negative stereotypes associated with their work. Results suggest that funeral directors experience various mental health challenges associated with the work that they do and barriers to accessing effective treatment or support. They also feel that those outside the profession hold stigmas and stereotypes about them that contribute to the mental health challenges they face. Future research should investigate mental health diagnoses in funeral director work and explore targeted and effective treatment for those in the field.

ABSTRACT War – destructive and bloody as it may be – has nevertheless been discursively framed as a valiant and noble deed by powerful state institutions and forces through political speeches and legislature. In recent years, however, the multimodal turn in critical discourse analysis saw the rise of war studies through the lens of war monuments and how these selectively frame war as a social practice. Using Abousnnouga and Machin’s three-dimensional social semiotics framework, this paper explores how semiotic resources employed in the Marawi Siege monument in the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery), Philippines, recontextualize the Marawi Siege by recontextualizing representations of government forces from violent contexts and situating them instead in sanitised contexts of humanitarian work – all the while (visually) silencing the plight of the Maranao people during the Siege. It further revealed that semiotic resources were used to weave a particular frame of narrative in the discourse of war through the celebratory, symbolic, and somewhat propagandistic narrative of the government and military, all of which may have been employed in order to support and provide evidence for its own institutional legitimacy and power.

ABSTRACT Funeral work is challenging because directors are expected to organise personal death rituals under time pressure, in collaboration with a family they usually don’t know, in an increasingly commercial context. In this article, we adopt the institutional logics framework to study how funeral directors cope with potentially conflicting work demands. Ten semi-structured interviews with Dutch funeral directors of large or medium-sized companies unveiled that a so-called ‘care logic’ dominates. In this institutional logic, directors devote time and attention to bereaved families, to organise a personal funeral that reflects the identity of the deceased and honours the wishes of the bereaved. However, simultaneously, funeral directors adopt a ‘business logic’ that centres around profitability and time-efficiency. To some extent, these logics proved to be compatible and may even strengthen each other: excellent care for families is considered a good business proposition, and a professional business-like back-office facilitates excellent care. However, particularly when many (complex and personal) funerals need to be organised, funeral directors experience tension between the institutional logics and they struggle to devote the time families ‘deserve’. Ultimately, funeral directors tend to prioritise care over business, sometimes at the expense of their own work–life balance, or the business’ profitability.

ABSTRACT What does it mean to visualise the corpse? Embedded within the seemingly simple provocation shaping this special issue are two difficult questions: what is a corpse, actually, and what does it mean to visualise one? In drug law and policy these are especially fraught questions. People who use drugs are often thought of as less-than-human in contexts that criminalise, incarcerate and execute them. These are ‘ungrievable lives’, in Judith Butler’s sense. Drug-related deaths are often depicted in media as an inevitability, and people who use drugs are constituted as if they were always already dead, both because their lives are apparently unproductive and dysfunctional, and because they are thought to be on an inescapable death trajectory. This has implications for how we consider when someone becomes a corpse. If those who use drugs are dismissed as the always already or inevitable dead, does it seem necessary to save them? Thinking with necropolitics, I ask what it means to think with and when the dead, and how this might be done with more care for otherwise ‘ungrievable’ lives.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I analyse paternalism in context of a specificity of the delicate relation between two basic moral obligations: the duty to help others and the obligation to respect their autonomy (i.e. respect them as human beings entitled to be respected). The duty to help is universal but restricted by the duty to respect all persons as such. This is the essence of inter-subjectivity as the source of morality and medium and context of everything we decide and do. One of the most important and apparent conflicts between these two duties is the dilemma of whether to help prolong life or to help die when prolonging life violates the integrity of life by denying its desired and accepted end. This entails that rigid concepts like ‘the sanctity of life’ perhaps cannot give an absolute guidance to what is necessarily morally right and may entail disrespect of both of the above mentioned two duties: rejecting helping might be a kind of disrespecting. This has an interesting implication regarding the Hippocratic Oath, which is often used as an excuse to avoid fulfilling the duty to help others in cases when they need such help most urgently.

ABSTRACT This meta-ethnography aims to unravel the meaning of suffering in the context of euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) using a multiperspective and international framework. More precisely, we seek to understand how the experience of suffering is (1) interpreted by the patients with a request, their close ones, and physicians and nurse practitioners who provide EAS and (2) how the cultural context may shape the way suffering is described. Using PRISMA guidelines, we included 19 articles (1) focusing on the experience of suffering; (2) written in Dutch, English, or French; (3) published in a peer-reviewed journal; and (4) using a qualitative design or containing rich qualitative data. Five intertwined dimensions were identified: existential, physical-neurocognitive, psycho-emotional, socio-environmental and systemic. Our results underline the nuances in the description of suffering across perspectives and cultural contexts. Our results may inspire those working on the threshold of suffering to adopt a nuanced and holistic approach when assessing patients with an EAS request.