What actually happens at a Death Café? What do people talk about? And why do attendees appear to find talking about death so … enjoyable?! Over the course of my doctoral studies with the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group (2017-21) I attended 20 Death Cafes across the UK, studying people’s interactions and interviewing attendees… Continue reading
This blog was written by Gina Tarditi, one of the first graduates from our MSc in End of Life Studies. On October 25th 2023, the Center for Palliative Care of Mexico organized the first “Café con Catrina” in Mexico City, which 28 people attended. The meeting was inspired by Death Café and Death Over Dinner. Both these movements,… Continue reading
In May 2021, after nearly three years of work, Dr Naomi Richards and I finally saw our article Death Café, Bauman and Striving for Human Connection in “Liquid Times”published in the journal Mortality. In the article, we offer a new, critical, and perhaps provocative perspective on the role that Death Café gatherings play and the purpose they… Continue reading
Before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted conventional thinking around death and dying, Death Cafés around the world were encouraging people to reflect on their mortality. Death Cafés are informal social spaces where strangers meet to ‘have a conversation’ about death and dying. They can be organised by anyone, anywhere in the world. With death rates now… Continue reading
Until Death Café meetings moved from cafes, libraries, community centres, cemeteries, etc. to the online sphere due to social distancing measures, it had not occurred to me to specify that my PhD thesis is about face to face Death Café meetings. Online Death Cafés were an exception, not the rule when I conducted my fieldwork… Continue reading
When in February 2014, I heard the news that my application for a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award had been successful, I could scarcely have imagined what would follow over the next six years. The Trust is perhaps unique among funders in the incredible extent to which it gives grantees the scope and encouragement to think… Continue reading
My now regular route from Clydeside to Dumfries takes me by motorway to within twenty miles of my destination, the University of Glasgow’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies, where I am a PhD student, linked with the End of Life Studies Group. I am researching how writers depict physician-assisted death, and suicide. Today I was pleased… Continue reading
We present three events in Dumfries and Galloway to initiate The Mitori Project, a new research collaboration focussed on end of life issues in the UK and Japan. Hirobumi Takenouchi, Haruka Hikasa, Yoshinori Takata, and Miho Tanaka will join us at the University of Glasgow, Dumfries Campus for the first project workshop, and we have also curated… Continue reading
