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
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
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
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
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
