By Dr Naomi Richards and Dr Marian Krawczyk In November 2018 we exhibited a series of drawings by a renowned Scottish artist showing powerful glimpses of death and dying. The exhibition was shown at the Yellow Door Gallery in Dumfries as part of the UK wide Being Human festival of the Arts & Humanities, and… Continue reading
A new fully-funded PhD scholarship on the philosophical underpinnings of palliative care is now open for applications. The deadline for applications is 13th May 2018. The PhD candidate will join the Glasgow End of Life Studies group, which works to develop and promote interdisciplinary approaches to end of life issues. This PhD will provide a… Continue reading
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
I drive past a statue of Jean Armour, the wife of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, every morning on the way to work. When my 4 year old daughter, travelling with me, asked me about the statue, I told her it was to celebrate the life of someone who had died; that the woman must… Continue reading
Individuals’ aesthetic preferences for a good death are as significant as physical suffering in decisions to opt for an assisted suicide. This is the main finding from my anthropological study, now available as an open access article Assisted Suicide as a Remedy for Suffering? The End-of-Life Preferences of British “Suicide Tourists” in the journal Medical Anthropology.… 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
Two of the most influential right-to-die campaigners in the UK, Debbie Purdy and Tony Nicklinson, died after voluntarily refusing food and fluid, as well as refusing antibiotics. This sparked my interest in this method of suicide as a natural extension of my research into debates around assisted suicide (Richards 2012; Richards 2014). It was reported in the press that… Continue reading
