Death and Culture – serie

Contemporary audiences are often shocked to learn that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, medical students around the world posed for photographic portraits with their cadavers; a genre known as dissection photography. Featuring previously unseen images, stories, and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death within the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives. The author pays particular attention to the use of dissection photographs as an expression of student identity, and as an evolving transgressive ritual intricately connected to, and eventually superseding, the act of dissection itself.

Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death. This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments.Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures. Organised around three themes – Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power – this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.

Popular media are powerful mirrors and makers of meaning around suicide.This book brings together scholars from across disciplines to examine how suicide is mythologized, politicized and challenged across film, TV, young adult literature, digital platforms, online communities, and more. From news coverage of celebrity suicide to social media interventions with at-risk youth, this wide-ranging collection explores suicide’s intersections with class, gender, chronic illness and cultural identity. Bridging academic analysis and lived realities, this volume offers vital tools for understanding, teaching and reimagining how suicide circulates in the stories we consume and create.

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.

Are we accepting of death, or in denial of it? What insights can we gain from the ways death has been imagined, theorized, and organized throughout Western social and intellectual history that might help us respond meaningfully to the climate emergency?This interdisciplinary study begins with the role of tragedy in Greek antiquity and examines European attitudes toward death, especially their entanglement with colonial atrocities and politically organized killings.Drawing on the work of philosophers, sociologists, historians, and psychoanalysts, this is a resounding call to confront our responsibility for the lives of others—and the future of life itself—amid the existential threats of the Anthropocene.

Are we accepting of death, or in denial of it? What insights can we gain from the ways death has been imagined, theorized, and organized throughout Western social and intellectual history that might help us respond meaningfully to the climate emergency?This interdisciplinary study begins with the role of tragedy in Greek antiquity and examines European attitudes toward death, especially their entanglement with colonial atrocities and politically organized killings.Drawing on the work of philosophers, sociologists, historians, and psychoanalysts, this is a resounding call to confront our responsibility for the lives of others—and the future of life itself—amid the existential threats of the Anthropocene.

The infrastructure of death is an undeniable part of urban life, yet it is often overlooked in the study of cities.This book explores the intricate dynamics between the living and the dead in six Latin American cities: Bogotá, Medellín, Lima, Buenos Aires, Quetzaltenango and Cuenca. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research, the author investigates how urban death infrastructures — such as cemeteries and spaces for the deceased — are shaped by rapid urbanization, legacies of violence, neoliberal policies and alternative spiritual practices.With a fresh Global South perspective, this unique contribution will challenge the boundaries of death studies, placing the infrastructure of death at the heart of urban life.

What does it mean to grieve a child lost to an act of terrorism? This book offers a powerful and deeply human exploration of traumatic bereavement, grounded in parents’ first-hand accounts of losing a child to political violence. Drawing on research in France, the book explores how such loss disrupts meaning, time and self. Through a phenomenological lens, it challenges clinical views of grief and trauma, revealing how parents resist closure and seek enduring bonds with the deceased. This is a compelling interdisciplinary study of love, memory and making meaning in the wake of unthinkable tragedy.