ABSTRACT An interview conducted with Emeritus professor Karla Holloway on the African American funeral director as preservers of culture and history illuminates her scholarship and importance to the field of Death Studies. Questions asked in order to understand her interdisciplinary academic background and her canonical book Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial were received with answers on how her knowledge of language and letters provide important understandings of death and dying in broad and heterogenous African American communities. Holloway shared her own personal grief narratives and how they inform her work by disclosing her purposeful and continual use of the term ‘Vilomah’ which she borrowed from Sanskit as a way to bring comfort to those who have lost a child. Ultimately, the interview showcases how premature loss in African American communities, inclusive to children and adults, lead to creative and distinctive rituals and memorial work – work born of trauma and pain but also resistance and resilience.

ABSTRACT The end-of-life documentaries that focus on natural death struggle with the question as to whether cinematic technology is able to express death as an event and whether it should even aspire to do so. In the process of filming dying people, questions of vulnerability, privacy, and empowerment become important, and each filmmaker makes ethical choices about how to approach the topic. By interviewing 14 documentary directors, using one audio commentary, and analysing 14 of their documentary films, I recognised two main approaches to filming death. Most documentaries exclude the moment of death, which becomes a private event outside the public eye. These films narrate the experiences of living people and use metaphorical means to communicate the moment of death. They respect the physical vulnerability of the dying people, and protect the viewer from potentially shocking images. Occasionally, some documentaries include deathbed scenes that confront physical aspects of dying. These films create an affective and embodied connection to death and dying in ways that invite the viewer to co-experience the process. In this article, I discuss the ethical approaches related to these two approaches through questions of consent, the films’ content, and viewer’s responsibility.

ABSTRACT Memorials of the lay dead in late medieval English churchyards were constructed from perishable materials, with the exhumation and reuse of burial plots suggesting that a timely forgetting of the individual was an accepted part of the commemorative process. From the 13th century onward, remains exhumed from old graves were increasingly redeposited in specific structures known as charnel houses. The collective redeposition of disarticulated skeletal remains in charnels anonymised the deceased, generating mortuary spaces which foregrounded communal rather than individual memory. In this paper, charnelling and its relation to memory in late medieval England is theorised and explored. Following this, early modern developments are investigated, employing the charnel of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, as a central case study. As the country’s largest late medieval charnel, its extreme treatment following the Dissolution of the Monasteries renders it a potent example of how religious reform affected mortuary practice during the period. Through the violent ejection of its contained remains and the structure’s secular repurposing as a print shop, treatments of the ancestral dead were employed to enact and manifest ideological change. This produced changes in London’s mortuary landscape which in turn memorialised the reformatory process itself.

ABSTRACT In this article, I consider the point that grief is politically potent because it seeks connections through a recognition of shared embodied precariousness and suffering. Bereavement, as is well-documented, can be transformative; it can bring about personal growth, but it can also create bonds with others in a similar situation, rallying communities into political action through shared grief or injustice. In a world where some lives are considered more grievable than others, as Judith Butler argues, what is far less explored is the way personal loss can unfold and expand into a politics of radical mourning for lives culturally choreographed as ‘ungrievable’. To untangle this grief experience, I draw on autobiographical material and scholarly concepts from bereavement studies and critical animal studies. I argue that the experience of witnessing human suffering and dying can sensitise the bereaved to ontological commonalities across the so-called species divide, triggering ‘anti-anthropocentric’ mourning that compels the mourner to embody the world anew and take action against injustice.

ABSTRACT Research about digital immortality has grown in recent years, predominantly focusing on either the social effects of forms of digital immortalisation or on the available technologies. Few studies, however, adopt a clear sociological focus that remains attentive to the ontological dimension of digital immortality. Adopting a future-oriented perspective, this article contributes to the sociological study of digital immortality by introducing the concept of the Virtual Deceased Person (VDP), a speculative artefact that convincingly simulates the mannerisms and character traits of a deceased person, allowing them to operate as social actors posthumously and preserve the human social bond. The article draws on anthropological and microsocial theory to characterise the VDP as a persona of the dead given agency and embodiment by future thanatechnologies. By positioning the concept within the digital immortality discourse and expanding the scope of the social bond to the study of digital immortality, I portray the VDP as a manifestation of posthumous personhood, arguing that it might facilitate preserving the social bond between the living and the dead throughout its creation process and its reintegration into the world of the living. I further discuss its implications for the emergence of a postmortal society of socially active, virtualised ancestors.

The aim of the book is to contextualise Dutch funerary practices in their wider legal, national and local contexts from historic, geographic, demographic, (multi)cultural and political perspectives...

ABSTRACT This autoethnography explores the experience of societal meanings of suicide from the perspective of people bereaved by suicide. The research focuses on three autoethnographic stories of everyday experiences in which personal meaning making and societal meanings of suicide intersect in contemporary Australian settings. Personal perspectives are positioned alongside broader discussions of suicide taboo to consider the implications for agency and meaning making. Key differences between conventional notions of stigma and structural stigma, and ways in which suicide taboo influences meaning making for people bereaved by suicide are explored. The paper proposes a recasting of action previously framed as internalised stigma as proactive self-preservation by people bereaved by suicide. It concludes by arguing that building capacity to see the societal taboos of suicide creates opportunities for strengthening agency in personal narratives of bereavement by suicide.

ABSTRACT In this article I develop the notion of Being-towards-grief as a way of conceptualising the blurred intersection between relationality and finitude. In contrast to an existential philosophical and psychological tradition that has privileged one’s own death in a rationalised fashion, I argue that we become aware of death through the relentless possibility of the other dying and the uncertainty and distress that this implies. Furthermore, I suggest that this encounter is paramount to an inherently ethical process of subjectification. I become who I am through an encounter with the possibility of the death of the other and the responsibility that this implies. Instead of a resolute and future-oriented life affirmation, the death awareness that Being-towards-grief entails, points to an acceptance of and humbleness with regard to human limitations, and gratitude for a common past.

ABSTRACT Discussions regarding end-of-life (EOL) preferences often occur late in the course of a disease leading to rushed clinical decisions misaligned with patient goals. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to identify EOL goals among a healthy sample of young adults (N = 305) through a possible selves framework. Common EOL hopes included: having loved ones present, closure, and living a full life. Common EOL fears included: pain and suffering, specific types of death, and dying alone. Hopes and fears related to religiosity were rare. Overall, participants felt more confident attaining EOL hopes than avoiding EOL fears. Even in young adulthood, when concerns related to ageing, illness, and dying are not acute, individuals have clear ideas regarding what they do and do not want to experience at their end of life. Conversations regarding EOL preferences should therefore be initiated with adult patients of all ages. Clinically, end-of-life training and care should integrate these psychological insights.

ABSTRACT This article uses the case study of Ian Brady to examine the previously hidden forms of labour that funeral directors do in managing the remains of particularly controversial criminals. Specifically, we extend the concept of the ‘difficult dead’, which we use to describe those that have offended both legal and moral codes by defiling particularly vulnerable victims in life. This offending makes their remains ‘dirty’ and difficult to classify among other remains. They must be kept separate and controlled as an ‘other’ as they risk contaminating the public. With this in mind, the article argues that funeral directors conduct extra, hidden forms of labour in navigating the risk of becoming contaminated by the dirt attached to the remains of the difficult dead. We make three contributions. First, we drive forward the valuable intersection between criminology and death studies, which has overlooked the ramifications that ‘difficult’ dead bodies have on the labour of death professionals. Second, we highlight some of the limits in current funerary codes of practice. Third, we generate a starting point for a discussion on the labour of funeral directors when attempting to care for the remains of difficult offenders.