Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture

Sharon Coleclough is Senior Lecturer in Film and Game Audio at Staffordshire University, UK. Her work focusses on representation and meaning through technical craft and narrative across media. Bethan Michael-Fox works for the Open University, UK teaching a range of interdisciplinary humanities and English literature modules. Bethan is co-host of The Death Studies Podcast. Renske Visser is medical anthropologist and death studies scholar living in Helsinki, Finland. Renske is co-host of The Death Studies Podcast.

• 1: Introduction to Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture.- 2: “To Show the Problem Inside and Out”: Representations of Mental Illness and Suicide in Eric Steel’s The Bridge.- 3: Twenty-First Century Digital Snuff: The Circulation of Images and Videos of Real Death Online.- 4: Streaming death: terrorist violence and the digital afterlife of difficult death.- 5: ‘Death. Carnage. Chaos’: mortality and mountaineering on-screen, and on the roof of the world.- 6: Bodies on the Battlefield: Death and Combat in Band of Brothers.- 7: Melissa Merchant and Simon Order - Representing Fatal Violence in AMC’s The Walking Dead: The Role of Legitimation, Graphicness and Explicitness.- 8: Are Normative Death Narratives Celebrated, Reinforced, or Disrupted in Popular Media? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Coco and Soul.- 9: Hashtag feminism: challenging rape and femicide in South Africa.- 10: A Weaponized Landscape: Hart Island’s Geography of Denial.- 11: Shakespeare: Difficult Dead Celebrity Child .- 12: There is nothing like a dead man to demand existence’ (Antonin Artaud).- 13: Difficult Deaths and Awkward Agendas: How Mainstream News Media Negotiate Coverage of Politically Dissonant Victims.- 14: Dissected, torn, and exposed: the death and remains of the Jack the Ripper victims in the Illustrated Police News.- 15: Photographing Death to Save Photojournalism Mafia Homicides in Letizia Battaglia's “Archive of Blood”.- 16: Economies of Mortalities: Ageism and Disposability During the Covid-19 Pandemic.- 17: Reflecting grief during a pandemic: online UK newspapers’ reportage and researchers’ experiences.- 18: Conclusion to Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture.