Dr Elizabeth Reeder, Dr Naomi Richards and Dr Amy Shea of the University of Glasgow have been a awarded a Research Network Grant (2022-24) by the prestigious Royal Society of Edinburgh to continue their work on Death Writes/ Reading & Writing Death & Dying. The grant is called COVID as Catalyst for Writing and Discussing Death, Dying… Continue reading
In the summer of 2018, Dr Marian Krawczyk and I co-authored an article about how the various western cultural ‘scripts’ which give meaning to dying might be influenced when assisted dying is made lawful and the very end stages of dying becomes, in essence, an ‘optional’ part of the lifecourse. Our thinking was very much… Continue reading
One of the most fundamental ways we show love and connection is through touch. This behaviour is so central to our understanding of what it means to be in relationship with another person that visual representations of touch have become one of the most common visual forms of ‘shorthand’ to indicate compassionate caring, including at… Continue reading
What challenges are there in exhibiting art which has used to help terminally ill patients and their relatives? Nadia Collette, art therapist and curator of Inner Light, talks about the project which resulted in an exhibition in Barcelona in the first half of 2016. This interview was a French-English collaboration, and the blog begins with a translation, followed by… Continue reading
I genuinely didn’t know anything about Dr Feelgood. The film title ‘The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson’ was also a mystery to me. The online blurb about the film was similarly obscure, describing how director Julien Temple had produced an ‘overflowing visual cocktail’ serving up ‘Bunuel, Tarkovsky, Cocteau and Marcel Powell as fellow travellers on his… 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
