Young people are not the usual attendees at Death Cafés. Perhaps this is because their youth makes death seem a remote prospect. Or because they are too busy trying to get a foothold in our precarious, zero-hours contract economy to spend too much time contemplating the hereafter. Instead of pondering young people’s absence at such… Continue reading
Our contacts at Age Scotland invited me to hold a death café with their members, and they also asked me to give a lecture about the ideas behind the international death café movement. As a new lecturer in end of life studies here at the University of Glasgow, I thought this would be an excellent… Continue reading
The ninth of May was a gorgeous spring evening, ‘exam weather’ as we call it in Scotland, and who could have expected over fifty people would come to a café to talk about death? Organised to mark the start of Death Awareness Week 2016, our death café at Designs Gallery and Cafe was hosted by local Castle Douglas… Continue reading
The night is black all around. The ‘supermoon’ is rising over the loch behind us. The damp air is on our backs. But our faces are warmed by the fire. The talk, drifting over the flames, is about mortality. This is the EAFS ‘off grid’ environmental festival, where artists, writers, makers and dreamers of dreams… Continue reading
Since arriving in Dumfries, I’ve been daily graced by a generous view of the local cemetery just across from a park suffocating with screaming, hyperactive children. At first sight, I was struck by how unassumingly picturesque it was—the cemetery sprawls across the side of a hill, rows of stone teeth unnervingly still against swaying trees,… Continue reading
There is lots of interest in deaths cafés right now. As part of our research project Global Interventions at the End of Life we are examining death cafés as a ‘cultural intervention’ – how they have come about, who organises and attends them, what part they may play in wider discourses about death and dying… Continue reading
