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This book is the first of its kind to examine key topics in death, dying, and bereavement through a critical lens, highlighting how the understanding and experience of death can vary considerably, based on social, cultural, historical, political, and medical contexts. It looks at the complex ways in which death and dying are managed, from the political level down to end- of- life care, and the inequalities that surround and impact experiences of death, dying, and bereavement. Readers are introduced to key theories, such as the medicalisation of dying, as well as contemporary issues, such as social movements, pandemics, and assisted dying. The book stresses how death is not only a biological ...
While death, dying and bereavement are universal life events, the social conditions under which death takes place are fundamental in shaping how it is experienced by the individual. Bringing together contributors from around the world, this collection of chapters provides sociological insights into death, dying and bereavement. Drawing upon a range of sociological theorists, including Émile Durkheim, Zygmunt Bauman and C. Wright Mills, the book reviews the historical contribution of sociology to the field of thanatology. In doing so, the book challenges individualistic psychological approaches to death, dying and bereavement and demonstrates how sociological approaches can shape, constrain ...
The term ‘sensitive research’ is applied to a wide range of issues and settings. It is used to denote projects that may involve risk to people, stigmatising topics, and/or require a degree of sensitivity on behalf of the researcher. Rather than take the notion of ‘sensitive research’ for granted, this collection unpacks and challenges what the term means. This book is a collective endeavour to reflect on research practices around ‘sensitive research’, providing in-depth explorations about what this label means to different researchers, how it is done – including the need to be sensitive as a researcher – and what impacts this has on methods and knowledge creation. The book in...
The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Issues in Health and Illness is a multidisciplinary reference book that brings together cutting-edge health and illness topics from around the globe. It offers a range of theoretical and critical perspectives to provide contemporary insights into complex health issues that can offer ways to address inequitable patterns of illness and ill health. This collection, written by an international pool of expert academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, is unique in providing theoretical and critical analyses on key health topics, considering power and broader social structures that influence health and illness outcomes. The chapters are org...
Contemporary audiences are often shocked to learn that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, medical students around the world posed for photographic portraits with their cadavers; a genre known as dissection photography. Featuring previously unseen images, stories, and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death within the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives. The author pays particular attention to the use of dissection photographs as an expression of student identity, and as an evolving transgressive ritual intricately connected to, and eventually superseding, the act of dissection itself.
Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death. This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments. Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures. Organised around three themes – Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power – this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.
Through a critical analysis of theory, policy and practice, The Public and Private Management of Grief looks at how 'recovery' is the prevailing discourse that measures and frames how people grieve, and considers what happens when people 'fail' to recover. Pearce draws on in-depth interviews with bereaved people and a range of bereavement professionals, to contemplate how ‘failures’ to recover are socially perceived and acted upon. Grounded in Foucauldian theory, this book problematises the notion of recovery, and instead argues for the acknowledgment of the experience of ‘non-recovery,’ highlighting how recovery is a socially and historically constructed notion linked to the individualised vision of health and happiness promoted by neo-liberal governmentality. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across sociology, anthropology, social work and psychology with a focus on death, dying and bereavement, grief studies, health and social care, as well as counsellors, clinical psychologists and social workers.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound and persistent impact - a tragic loss of life, changes to established patterns of life and social inequalities laid bare. It brought out the good in many and the worst in others, and raised questions around what is truly important in our lives. In this book, academics, activists and artists come together to remember, and to reflect on, the pandemic. What lessons should we learn? How can things be different when this is over? Sensitive to inequalities of gender, race and class, the book highlights the experience of marginalised and minority groups, and the unjust and uneven spread of violence, deprivation and death. It combines academic analysis with personal testimonies, poetry and images from contributors including Sue Black, Led By Donkeys, Lara-Rose Iredale, Michael Rosen and Gary Younge. This truly inclusive commemorative overview honours the experience of a global disaster lived up close, and suggests the steps needed to ensure we do better next time.
An inevitable and universal experience, dying is experienced by individuals in different ways, often related to the character of our relationships, family structures, gender identities, cultural backgrounds, and economic means. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork with patients, carers and health professionals in Australia and the United Kingdom, Dying: A Social Perspective on the End of Life provides a critical examination of the different spheres of dying, in social and cultural context. Exploring complex issues such as the politics of assisted dying, negotiating medical futility, gender and dying, the desire for redemption, the moralities of 'the good fight' and the lived experience...
This edited collection explores the multiple ways in which ethnography and health emerge and take form through the research process. There is now a plethora of disciplinary engagements with ethnography around the topic of health, including anthropology, sociology, geography, science and technology studies, and in health care professions such as nursing and occupational therapy. This dynamic and evolving landscape means ethnography and health are entangled in new and different ways, providing a timely opportunity to explore what these entanglements do and affect in the social production of knowledge. Rather than discussing the strengths (and limitations) of ethnography for engaging with health, the book asks: what does ethnography enable, make visible and possible for knowing and doing health in contemporary research settings and beyond?