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This discussion explores the themes of the paper “When a therapist is diagnosed with a terminal illness.” Issues discussed include the meaning of a long term survivor of HIV/AIDS being diagnosed with a terminal cancer, abruptly closing a therapy practice and terminating with patients, and the personal process of coping with death and dying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I make use of Shernoff's professional and personal experience in confronting his terminal illness to advance a dialogue about therapists' human vulnerability in the face of illness and impending death and the negotiation of these experiences with patients. Therapists of all stripes are generally more comfortable being compassionate healers who lend themselves to other people's pain than they are being seen by their patients as vulnerable individuals who suffer incapacity, life threatening illness and their own mortality. The complex nature of therapists' anxieties in relation to these circumstances is discussed. I suggest that the psychotherapeutic relationship offers important opportunities to struggle productively with the human condition as both members of the dyad live what comes their way. The case is made that because therapeutic relationships endure intra-psychically long after treatments end, the manner in which they end powerfully determines how patients are able to make use of them. Treatments that end traumatically due to the therapist's illness create ruptures that can sometimes be repaired when therapists are able to re-engage with their patients to mutually create a better termination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the paper of Chandler. She remarks to find the paper difficult but fascinating particularly Chandler's argument that Sterne draws on an-ongoing tradition of argue on the fate of the soul after death, the "vehicular hypothesis." She added that the general theory of vehicularity was part of the eighteenth-century study of pneumatology or pneumatics (spiritual being), and was raised to offer philosophic arguments for the continued existence of the soul after death.

This paper explores how death is represented in the popular Netflix television series Squid Game. While death is an overarching theme in this series, there is one feature of its storytelling that sets it apart from other fictional deadly games' televisual or cinematic franchises. Indeed, Squid Game depicts players implicitly consenting to die if they lose the game. This narrative is centered on the deep vulnerabilities that come from social inequalities and create conditions in which death can be staged as merchandise to be sold or bought for entertainment purposes. This paper describes and analyzes how the implicit consent to death was portrayed as the ultimate outcome of social inequalities, as a commodity, and as an object of leisure. We will conclude the paper by discussing the implications of exposure to this discourse during leisure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This theoretical paper describes a classification with accompanying analysis of the main forms of social conduct at the end of life that goes beyond our usual understanding of sociological characterisations of dying. A taxonomy of end-of-life conduct is presented that illustrates and categorises past and contemporary sociological studies of end-of-life conduct and experiences. The categories include embodiment-led dying, systems-led dying, criticism-led dying, endangerment, and anti-dying. Discussion of this spectrum of behaviour is compared with current research and theory in the sociology of dying resulting in critical observations about limitations and omissions in the current work of this field. The paper ends with identification of theoretical limitations before discussing implications for future theory, research, and policy development for the sociology of dying and for end-of-life studies more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 25 years, a number of concepts that broadly centre on human suffering, conflict, and death have developed and proliferated in heritage studies. As a 'trauma and truth telling' discourse is embraced globally, there is a marked increase in the recognition of heritage connected to trauma, suffering and tragedy. Yet, despite the breadth and depth of research in this space, psychological trauma has been largely unexamined in the field of heritage studies. Therefore in this interdisciplinary paper, we ask: what is trauma? What is the relationship between trauma and heritage? And what does it mean to be trauma-informed? We introduce the concept of trauma-informed heritage (TIH) and suggest that heritage connected to traumatic events can be conceived as trauma-heritage (TH). Together, the TIH and TH concepts shine a light on heritage connected to trauma, which is multiplex and multiscalar. We offer this framework to better acknowledge and understand trauma and critically explore the relationships between trauma and heritage. This frame will provide awareness of the impact of trauma on people in the wake of traumatic events and help mitigate the risk of re-traumatising, now and for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roadside memorials are made up of objects, usually flowers, candles and crosses, placed at the roadside to mark the sites of fatal accidents. The paper introduces the potential of Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis and geography of rhythms in exploring roadside memorials. The aim of the paper is to investigate rituals and rhythms at roadside memorials in Poland. Data were collected during two-year field observations of 12 roadside memorials and from 10 semi-structured interviews. Polish roadside memorials are part of widespread rituals which either generate material changes to roadside memorials, like cleaning up works, leaving candles and flowers at memorials or which do not generate such changes, like saying prayers or reminiscing about the deceased. The specifics of roadside memorialisation in Poland are expressed in prayers being said and no personal belongings being left at the sites. We found that the coexistence of individual and social rhythms at roadside memorials was deeply rooted in Catholic liturgy and commonly accepted cemetery rituals in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the consequences of the necropolitical border regime on border crossers' lives on the Greek island of Lesvos. It focuses on the manifold abandonments (left-to-die practices) that border crossers experience inside and beyond the refugee camps and detention centres, arguing that this inhuman and degrading treatment inflicts, normalises and naturalises disposability, humiliation, and social death. The paper combines a social harm approach, critical migration and border studies, and insights from anthropology to analyse border crossers' lived experiences of violence. In doing so, the paper contributes to the growing literature on the politics of abandonment and disposability as a modus operandi of migration governance. It also expands on social harm typologies by introducing a new conceptual category of harm which I term 'necroharms'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper and Return of the Grasshopper, game-play is claimed to be the ‘ideal of existence’ and the only activity that could sustain us through the ‘endless and endlessly boring summer’ of utopia. Christopher Yorke has challenged these claims by way of a constructive dilemma. If these games are sufficiently akin to the games we play, then they are not adequate to the task of rendering immortality tolerable. If these games are importantly different than the games we play, then, in being ‘unknown and unknowable’, they would characterize a form of life that is importantly different from our own and, so, would be inappropriate objects of social and political aspiration. Against Yorke’s skepticism, I argue that the games that constitute the ideal of existence are intelligible to us because we already play what the Grasshopper calls ‘open games’. Steffen Borge concedes that utopian games are intelligible, but argues that such games would fail to ‘grab our minds and imagination’. In the second half of the paper, I contend, against Borge, that such open games are adequate to the task of sustaining the interest of an immortal community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section announces that paper proposals for concurrent sessions of the 2006 International Death, Grief, and Bereavement Conference on June 4-7, 2006 are being accepted until November 1, 2005. Guidelines for submission can be gleaned from the web site www.uxlax.edu.

Drawing on Levinasian concepts of sleep, insomnia, and the il y a, this paper examines the liminal states of insomnia and sleep within the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Sleep and insomnia, being proximates of death as well as displacement and anonymous existence successively, are topics that have not, to the best of our knowledge, received any critical commentary within (post)colonial studies. This paper argues that the Israeli military occupation deprives Palestinians from sleep, casting them into the horror and anonymous existence of insomnia which, like the Israeli occupation, signifies impervious dialogue and is a catalyst for both psychic and physical displacement. As the Israeli occupation deprives Palestinians of place and sleep, two terms in the words of Levinas recognised as intertwined, it is the ethical responsibility of Palestinians and Palestinian leaders to arm themselves with wakefulness so as to secure their homeland (place) and to fortify themselves against displacement and the horror of the night. Sleep reveals an ethical dimension when examined closely within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to its subtle proximity to death. Hence, we contend that falling asleep on the part of Palestinians is unethical due to its direct adverse effects, namely, displacement and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During real or presumed life-threatening incidents and/or near-death circumstances, some people experience a visual life relations reminder (VLRR), which consists primarily of imagery portraying and focused on living loved ones that visually appear in an uncontrollable and/or rapid manner. This phenomenon differs from the more recognised life review that also sometimes occurs under similar conditions, which is instead a visual memory revival of past self-inclusive events or activities. This exploratory paper is the first to specifically discuss VLRRs and provides relevant insight from a reflexive thematic analysis of 57 VLRRs, generating some important qualitative themes based on meaningful patterns identified in narrative data. Relevant data excerpts to support the generated themes are provided and then those themes are discussed in more detail. This paper closes with a hypothesis that the VLRR is a purposeful and beneficial psychological phenomenon with an effect that often boosts the experient’s will to live and survive by reminding them of important relationships in their current life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture is one of the most important and also hazardous industries in Australia. Having a sound knowledge and understanding of the circumstance of injury events is critical to developing evidence-based intervention programs. This paper aims to provide a brief historical snapshot of the development of data systems underpinning the assessment of fatal farm injury in Australia and how it has impacted on safety policy and practice. The first Australian studies used coronial information to explore agricultural fatalities, these studies reviewed paper-based records (in-situ) and collected the information for analysis and reporting. This task was laborious and costly. When the National Coronial Information System (NCIS) was established in 2000, this allowed access to coronial records online. Information provided about the deceased includes demographics, contextual details on the nature of the fatality and autopsy, toxicology, and police reports, as-well-as the coroner's finding. Information from the NCIS, along with media reports, have been used to develop the farm fatality database. This information has been used to inform the safety goals and targets for farm commodity groups, identify key risks, provide long-term benchmark indicators and underpin the development of prevention materials and training resources. Without accurate, timely, concise and relevant data about injury occurring on farms, there is no evidence to drive policy and practice or to evaluate programs of work. As such, the continued utilization and extension of the NCIS data will prove crucial to further reducing the burden of preventable fatal injuries on Australian farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how Ebola survivors in Sierra Leone are enacting biological citizenship to effect responsive and accountable engagement with their government. Disaster survivors are often left without avenues to hold policymakers accountable, but, recently, injured or disabled people have taken legal action against their governments over issues such as negligence, delays, damaged property, and death. However, in Sierra Leone, members of the Ebola survivors' association have sued the government at the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice over a less conventional issue: corruption. After audit reports uncovered instances of financial impropriety that compromised the country's response to the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak, two plaintiffs sued the government with the argument that corruption and the failure of the government to hold the culprits accountable constitute abuses of the rights to life and health of those affected by the disaster, and the entire population. Based on this case, the paper argues that the lawsuit is an attempt to redefine corruption as a health hazard and a human rights violation. This challenges authorities to give serious attention to how financial improprieties affect the ability of state agencies to guarantee equitable, dignified healthcare, and to take the post-disaster rehabilitation of survivors as a critical component of reconstruction programmes. Ultimately, the lawsuit might set a precedent for other disaster survivors to demand equitable and dignified access to health and proper rehabilitation. This paper draws on scholarly literature, official documents, and conversations with some of the survivors and their lawyer to make this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on original ethnographic research in Australia focussing on the handling, management, and conceptualisation of death and the dead human body in 2020–2021. Analysis produced themes of secrecy and (in)visibility regarding both death and the collection of data. Key findings discussed are the withdrawal of information and off-the-record comments from participants, controlling of public access to information, and the (in)visibility of death and the body in the context of the mortuary, viewings and identifications, and the presentation of the body in virtual spaces. The paper argues that those who work with death and the dead in this particular context have power to shield their work, the body, and their processes from the public. Future research exploring the attitudes held by the general public towards death and the body and whether they align or challenge the death industry is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically analyses deaths in prison in England and Wales. It focuses on how the state's 'truth' about the nature and extent of these deaths has been challenged and develops an alternative perspective which situates these deaths in the context of a system built on violence and systemic indifference and where state agents are protected by a culture of immunity and impunity. It also illustrates the often-abysmal treatment of the families of dead prisoners and the struggles they have engaged in, alongside the charity INQUEST1, to establish the actual truth about the deaths of their relatives and to hold to account those responsible for these deaths, many of which were preventable. The paper concludes by outlining a range of radical alternatives to the current baleful situation including humanising prisoners and removing the stigma of less eligibility which has prevailed for 200 years and has legitimated the pain and punishment inflicted on them by the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue entitled "Futures of Digital Death: Mobilities of Loss and Commemoration" explores the topic of digital death and how technologies are reconfigured by and reconfiguring social relationships with the deceased and dying loved ones as well as the larger ecosystem supporting such relationships. This Introduction article starts with an overview of the past research on digital death intended to provide a relevant context for the five papers included in this issue. Then, we reflect on how the current papers, or the present research, build on the past and can be used to address existing gaps and to inform future new research directions in order to move the field forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a first thorough examination of what happens to one's emails on death. The paper demonstrates that some content of emails can be protected by copyright and transmitted on death accordingly. The paper then analyzes the contractual provisions of the main email providers, Google and Microsoft, in order to determine how these contracts, regulate the transmission of emails on death. The author finds that these provisions complicate the issues of property and transmission of digital assets and do not offer a meaningful control over the assets for their users. The paper adopts a novel focus introduced in the author's earlier research, the idea of post-mortem privacy that is the right to privacy after death. This concept serves as an argument against the default transmission of emails on death without the deceased's consent, whether through the laws of intestacy or by requiring the service providers to provide access to the deceased's emails. Finally, the paper canvasses a solution which combines law and technology. It is argued that much more control should be placed in the hands of emails users. Post-mortem privacy, a potentially contested phenomenon, only accentuates the need to better account for the interests of the deceased, having in mind the volume of personal data and personal nature of emails. Therefore, an in-service solution is promoted, backed up by policy and legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The burnt frame of Grenfell is a site of sacrificed lives. Employing the imagery of the charred remains of the burnt-out tower as an 'optical machinery', this paper examines the iconography of the condemned tower block through its forensic remains. Grenfell as an inferno of suffering is a site of 'visual hysteria' locked through the screams of death and carnage of flesh, blood and bones. In the process, the iconography of the charred tower is a slippage of chronotopes, unresolved human anguish, austerity politics and a spectacle of interrogation through public enquiry. This archive of the tragic functions as a site of multiple renderings of temporality, testimonies and the 'hauntology' of the death event imagined both in real time, through flesh witnessing and as a repository of death narratives online. Coding it as an 'optical machinery', this paper deconstructs Grenfell as a mutilated iconography of necroaesthetics consummated through the flesh of the 'blackened'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human bodies are typically buried underground, horizontally 'in repose'. To the extent that this orientation has become the standard; it is a non-choice that is under-interrogated by scholars. In this paper, we discuss innovations which allow for the vertical orientation of the body within the earth and for the vertical stacking of remains above the earth in high-rise structures. Both of these boundary-pushing forms of disposition address imminent shortages in the land allocated for cemeteries in the context of intense urbanisation and a peaking death rate. They also promise to transform the necrogeography of contemporary cities and intimate relations between the living and the dead. This paper is a collaboration between the DeathTech Research Team and the Managing Director of Upright Burials, where the dead are 'stood to rest' in shaft graves. The pragmatic advantages of vertical burial are easily explicated, but in this paper, we focus on the cultural and symbolic dimensions of this largely unfamiliar spatial relation and the challenges of 'reorienting' the public towards this new form of disposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research shows that grief affects the body and brain in many ways, from changes in memory, behavior, body function, and immune system. Grief also takes different forms. Grief is an individualistic journey, yet we tend to judge others based on our personal experiences, rather than taking a wholistic, therapeutic approach. This paper explains how our brain, behaviors, and emotions are all engaged during bereavement, and how to best help grieving colleagues and subordinates. This paper demystifies the concept of grief and provides practical advice for working with a grieving employee or colleague, specific to the library setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews two recent works on the modern-day American death ways American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-first Century by Shannon Dawdy and The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-first Century edited by Dawdy and Tamara Kneese. Dawdy's book is commended for its thoughtful description and analysis of several of the major new trends in American death-related ideas and practices and for its lively style. The discussion of The New Death consists of a critical review of each of the book's chapters, which emphasizes the strengths and critiques some of the shortcomings of each piece. The only major criticism of both of the works under review is the fact that they pay very limited attention to those Americans who reject the innovative ideas and practices documented here. The review also calls for additional detailed ethnographies of the contemporary American death ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We Die As We Live, is an art in health research project that positions palliative care staff, working in a myriad of capacities in hospital and hospice settings, as 'Death Elders' because of their expert knowledge and accumulated experience of death and dying. This paper speculates on the commemorative dimensions of death, dying and bereavement as embodied in socially-engaged artistic processes. The weekly art workshops I organised, during my yearlong artist residency at St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, were designed to solicit meaningful reflection about death and its impact on the staff, using craft materials, mediums and processes that engaged the participants' senses, and encouraged open discussion about mortality and impermanence. At the end of the residency, when these collective works on paper and ephemeral sculptures were presented in the waiting areas of St Vincent's Hospital, they illustrated that every death is unique and every experience of death is unique, reinforced that we are all connected by this universal truth, and invited public discussion and reflection about the pervasive influence of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 5 May 2021 we celebrate the bicentenary of Napoleon's death. Despite autopsy findings of a "gastric cancer" and, more importantly, gastric perforated ulcer complicated with bleeding, the questions about the illness that tormented Napoleon at St. Helena and whether the death was a consequence of a poisoning, maintain an unbroken fascination. PubMed/MEDLINE lists hundreds of articles. We also consulted Index-Cat library for articles dating back to the eighteenth century. The present paper presents for the first time a systematic review on this topic. The authors divided the selected articles according to the methodology of the papers: (a) illness and autopsy evidence revised by current pathological knowledge; (b) toxicological tests on Napoleon's hair performed by modern analytical techniques. None of the articles denied the toxicological evidence from Napoleon's hair, although analytical papers did not offer homogeneous results due to several biases. Few of them refuted the hypothesis of death due to primary toxic substances. Most considered gastric bleeding is the primary cause of Napoleon's death due to solely or nearly completely gastric cancer or to medications containing antimony, mercury, or arsenic. Upon review of the contemporary and modern evidence, we classify Napoleon's 1821 death as "unnatural" with massive gastric bleeding due to primary involvement of toxic substances that may have precipitated or exacerbated an underlying "natural" pathological condition or a disease as likely could be a stomach carcinoma; it does not imply criminal intent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 26 September 2020, stated that India had introduced legal reforms to accord rights to transgender citizens. Even though there is not much material basis to these rights, transgender communities have been protesting against the state and at times negotiating with it to get laws that are more in alignment with their rights. In the wake of serialised deaths and precarity intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, transgender communities also stage other negotiations in the everyday with activists, transnationally funded NGOs and academics researching their communities, encounters that are not as spectacular as the protests against the state, but that which ensures their daily sustenance. This paper investigates how they inhabit these systemically violent institutions. Deploying ethnographic field notes from eastern India, this paper argues that they inhabit them subjunctively, which is not about refusing engagement with what is oppressive but about the ceaseless conjuring of improvisatory and contingent gestures that are marked by hope as well as uncertainty. The simultaneity of protests, rage, hopelessness, hope, negotiations, supplications and scepticism allow them to not only endure the violence of institutions but also to rupture them and imagine them otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the vast developments in research on loss and grief, dominant grief models fall short in reflecting the comprehensive issues grieving persons are facing. Three causes seem to be at play: grief is usually understood to be connected to death and other types of loss are under-researched; the majority of research is done from the field of psychology and on pathological forms of grief, hardly integrating research from other disciplines; and the existential suffering related to grief is not recognized or insufficiently integrated in the dominant models. In this paper, we propose an integrated process model (IPM) of loss and grief, distinguishing five dimensions of grief: physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual. The integrated process model integrates therapies, tools, and models within different scientific theories and paradigms to connect disciplines and professions. The comprehensive and existential understanding of loss and grief has relevance for research, clinical settings and community support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While performing fieldwork in Fort St. John (July 2019-August 2020), I attended two traditional funerals organised by Doig River First Nation, a Dane-zaa First Nation of North-eastern British Columbia. As per the Dane-zaa tradition, drumming, singing, and dancing around the fire were key components of both funerals. Nevertheless, there was an essential difference between the two ceremonies. The 2019 funeral celebrated for Janice Askoty was a blended ceremony where traditional practices were performed alongside a Christian liturgy. Such a ceremony underlined existing tensions between community members regarding faith and systems of beliefs. These tensions were absent in the 2020 funeral celebrated for Annie Oker, where there was no Christian liturgy. Drawing on my observations and using the concept of syncretism, in this paper, I highlight how indigenous cultural practices, symbols, and beliefs have been integrated with Christian practices to the point that new blended practices have been established. At the same time, I point out how some traditional practices (i.e. drumming, singing, and dancing around the fire) have not been modified by external influences, surviving until now. In conclusion, I describe how colonialism's legacy still manifests itself during funerary celebrations and how community members perceive, face, and counter it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Livestreaming and filming death rites and funeral ceremonies to enable remote engagement proliferated rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many expect these options to remain prevalent going forward. This paper draws on interviews with a diverse UK sample of 68 bereaved people, funeral directors, officiants and celebrants. It illustrates how, and explains why, people's experiences and evaluations of hybrid funerals can vary. In a context when in-person gatherings were limited, hybridisation played a valuable role in enabling more people to engage with funerals. However, virtual attendance was often considered less satisfying than in-person attendance because it did not enable people to participate well in the funeral activities that mattered to them or to participate with others as they would in person. Scope for participation was partly contingent on the functionality and use made of technology, including whether and which steps were taken to facilitate engagement and a sense of connection for those joining online. People's evaluations of hybrid funerals could also reflect their relationships to the deceased and their frames of reference – for example, whether they were comparing virtual attendance to attending in person, or to being unable to attend at all, or to an overwhelmingly large funeral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rituals are central to the everyday life of the nurse, yet the fundamental roles that rituals play in caring for the dead and dying has often been neglected. This paper explores modern palliative and post-mortem care – its practices, practitioners and arenas – against the background of long-held, global concerns regarding the dead and dying. Comparison with the archaeological and ethnographic records demonstrates the ubiquitous and enduring practices surrounding death, and the centrality of ritual specialists to this complex social and biological process. This deep-time perspective highlights the importance of nurses, and their associated nursing rituals, in the transition of patients between life and death, and the difficult journeys that nurse, patient and family undertake in this mediation between worlds. Such a perspective not only empowers nurses in their daily practices, and places nursing rituals firmly at the centre of modern palliative care work, but demonstrates the value of archaeology and ethnography in contextualising the challenges of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of Khwabnama as one is treated to several roving apparitions, almost invariably those who died violent deaths, it occurs that the point of the ghostly dead is not direct involvement in human lives but simply making an appearance. I would go even further in saying that the thick descriptions of the moments of death and the resurfacing of the dead as ghosts or ghostly elements don't have a behind of them, they don't stand for anything other than for themselves and it is their appearance with which we have still to contend if we are to understand what is happening. it is precisely when the dead appear that we can inquire into their appearance to ask what sense they make in themselves, what is the ontology intrinsic to them? Toward this end, in this paper I attempt to focus on the lurid descriptions of the deaths of specific characters and their re-appearance as the dead to draw out how, rather than what, they are presenting. In this process of skewing our apperception of the novel, we stand to see how the novel may not aspire to absolute truth or historical significance, but rather be attempting to show the struggle over sense-making in our times, which is ultimately that over forging community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Edwin Chadwick released his report into burial reform in 1843 he was highly critical of the working-class practice of keeping the dead body in the home for up to a week in the period between death and burial. Chadwick argued that the English working-classes kept the body for so long for economic reasons and that as a result of living in close quarters with a corpse they picked up negative associations with death and suffered moral decline. This paper overturns this assumption by using evidence from nineteenth-century folklore collections and working-class autobiography to argue that the long-standing tradition of keeping the body in the home and rallying round to prepare it for burial held a deep significance for rural working-class people. The gradual preparation of the body for burial engaged the senses and centred on the visual appearance of the corpse enabling rural folk to confirm social bonds through the formation of collective memories, demonstrate the respectability of both the deceased and their family, accept the reality of death, and begin the mourning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on 15 months of fieldwork and archival research carried out in 2018/2019 for my PhD in Social Anthropology, takes as its object the everyday coexistence with the Second World War military dead scattered across the rural landscape of Brandenburg, formerly part of the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). Focusing on the practices through which the living relate to the war dead 'out of place', I argue that the construction of the war dead as valued members of the social collectivity does not necessarily depend upon their ritual 'separation'. Indeed, the physical proximity of the misplaced and unrelated war dead in my fieldsite results in their adoption and conceptualization as local dead. I contextualize attachments to the fallen in the local history of chaotic 'total war', which collapsed the boundary between the military and civilian experience of war, and transformed the spaces of everyday life into battlefields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a particularly violent police operation inside the Prince Edward subway station on August 31 2019, during the anti-extradition movement in Hong Kong, a group of older women performed mourning rituals for the possibly dead outside the subway exit for almost one hundred days. In view of increasing police surveillance, violence, and arrests, these women's religious practices and the sociality they generated constituted a form of infrapolitics. By carefully performing their gendered roles as funerary experts, these women created a makeshift shrine that operated symbolically as a public sphere of dissent. This paper examines the making of their shrine in the context of widespread public discontent about police brutality, and by extension, state violence in a broader political-economic context. Without knowing who was being memorialized, the continuous flow of mourners to the Prince Edward Station shrine compels scholars to consider what these possible deaths could mean and what other losses they were accounting for. Through the lens of infrapolitics, these women's creative appropriation of mourning rituals directs our attention to the amebic vitality of resistance and its persistence against great odds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Werner Herzog avers that cinema reveals a truth beyond mere fact, a truth he calls 'ecstatic truth'. The film that offers the clearest view of this conception, the mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004), remains understudied and obscure. In Incident, Herzog plays a fictionalized version of himself who is making a documentary about the Loch Ness monster. This fictional version of Herzog shares the real Herzog's filmmaking philosophy, a philosophy Incident lays bare for study: namely, Incident reveals how the pursuit of ecstatic truth takes us to the limits of human understanding. While Incident helps us explore the concept of ecstatic truth, I argue it also helps us understand much of Herzog's oeuvre, including 2005's Grizzly Man. In this paper, therefore, I analyze ecstatic truth as presented in Incident and apply that understanding to Grizzly Man and its controversial tape scene. Examining said scene through the lens of the ecstatic truth will, I argue, not only garner us fuller insight into Herzog's films, but will also shed light on the effects of Herzog's controversial choice to not play the tape of Timothy Treadwell's death in Grizzly Man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the social visibility of children from Gaelic Irish and settler families during the 17th and 18th centuries given the very significant economic and cultural changes which followed the Plantation of Ulster. Predominantly Protestant settlers from Britain ousted native Catholic congregations from traditional places of worship, which became Protestant churches, and graveyards were now shared with Planter families. Using information from the south and west of the province of Ulster, it examines how children's memorials may signify the religious, social and/or ethnic identity their families wished to express. It explores how distinctive familial plots were perhaps one means of maintaining complex Gaelic Irish kin relationships in danger of erosion and may have helped settlers replace or strengthen social networks from their original homes. High status interments which included children in prestigious native burial grounds may also have been a means of control and a powerful symbol of subjugation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substance use disorders (SUD) represent a pervasive and ongoing public health crisis responsible for many deaths and hospitalizations each year. Despite decades of research, we have yet to develop an effective cross-substance treatment model. Many who seek and enter treatment for SUD end up relapsing despite their intentions. Inconsistency in treatment success necessitates the identification of novel, universal therapeutic targets in the underlying core mechanisms of SUD. Determining the cognitive mechanisms which promote addictive behaviors is an essential first step to fully understand relapse and maintenance in SUD. The goal of the current review is to explore underlying cognitive processes which prolong SUD despite treatment. Through this, we propose a mechanistic model for how intrusive cognitions may jeopardize symptom improvement and SUD treatment success via risky decision making. Intrusive cognitions - images, words, memories, or impulses - demand little cognitive effort, and lend themselves to quick action and decisions. In the current paper, we present evidence which shows how intrusive cognitions, poorly inhibited, could impair the decision making process in SUD and lead to subsequent addictive behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influence of climate on the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in France. Ordinary, time-varying, and threshold regressions of the number of cases and deaths are run on weather and government variables. The main findings support the role of climate in Covid-19 spread. The results reveal that a rise in temperatures is negatively associated with reported deaths, while an increase in relative humidity or wind and a decrease in precipitations are negatively associated with confirmed cases. These weather variables appear statistically significant only during the winter season. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-conflict Nepali society, death is discussed in subjective terms. The Maoists equated death with sacrifice. The dead person was seen as a sacrificing revolutionary and the dead was discussed in the pretext of a political and social movement. Consequently, while the security forces used the notion of death to protect the nation state, the Maoist revolutionary used it to defeat the existing power structures, the reactionary and feudal forces. In this paper, while drawing from ethnography carried out during 2009–2010 and a followup in 2018 in Nepal, I explore various narratives that seek to frame death as a concept of 'martyrology' - liberation from socio-cultural and political inequality. Martyrdom occupy a significant place in the Maoist revolutionary ideology Death – mrytu is exalted as 'the image' that revolutionaries adhere to, as a by-product of the process of revolution and to place oneself in a category of the self-actualised being. The Maoists framed this within the ideology of 'martyrology' where death and destruction were seen as creative strategies for revolution to continue and dying for social cause was a means to self-actualisation. Death during Maoists conflict was thus argued meaningful in terms of political martyrdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper opens by establishing a fact through fieldwork: a 70-year-old mass grave containing the remains of several hundred communist fighters who died in the battle of Florina (12 February 1949) was recently marked by a monument commemorating the fallen combatants. The erection of the monument (inaugurated in 2016) bypassed other sequences typically present in similar cases. None of the steps conventionally encouraged by post-conflict peacebuilding initiatives: exhuming the human remains in order to identify them, dignify them, move them (or return them to their families), and finally reinter them--was undertaken. A central piece of the memorial site built around the (quite large) spot of the mass grave, the monument de facto seals the human remains underground. In order to understand the ethnographical facts, we follow several trends of explanation. After looking at the conflict (the Greek Civil war), we show the intricacies of local panorama in which political struggle was underpinned by long-standing ethnic conflict. The nexus of memory-and-history is analyzed under two angles, the hidden memory of the defeated and the various claim on the "historical truth" laid by historical and new political formations. The struggles over "historical truth," in relation with the extremely sensitive issue of the unity of the nation (and the blame laid on some populations for "national treason") are viewed as one of the reasons for the lack of any demand for, or the practice of, transitional justice. Political agendas, along with the continuing marginalization of the most directly concerned group, are in fact obstacles to exhumation: if not feared, the identification after the removal of the dead from the mass grave was not supported by any social force or group. Other elements: specific ritual treatment of the dead in Greek culture, issues of land property and land use--are brought in line to suggest that, instead of exhuming the dead bodies, the field containing them could be more easily transformed into burial ground. The local response, as well as the initiatives taken by political actors, did all meet in one point: transforming the mass grave into a funerary site by granting it the legal status of a "green space." It is this consensus that explains why a monument to the dead was erected--so as not to have to exhume them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryopreservation presents the possibility of circumventing irreversible death through the body's extreme cooling. Once cooled, this 'cryon' is then stored at sub-zero temperatures until medical knowledge enables curative revival. However, the possibility of the post-cryopreserved supporting themselves, both economically and socially, is dubious; they will likely need state assistance. What a future society owes the post-cryopreserved, and why, remains unclear. One potential solution is to consider revivals as comparable to refugees, with the latter fleeing spatially and the former fleeing temporally. But, the appropriateness of the 'cryonic refugee' remains unconsidered. This paper uses the 1951 Refugee Convention to clarify refugeehood's four necessary characteristics before exploring whether these qualities apply to the temporally displaced. It concludes that while similarities exist, the comparison fails due to the limitations placed on the form of persecution that one flees and why repatriation is impossible. Thus, any assistive obligation must come from an alternative source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most striking characteristics of Roman funerals, is that they and the related personnel were associated with a suburban grove consecrated to Libitina, whose name can also metonymically mean 'death'. Several ancient writers talk about this goddess, and occasionally associate her with Venus. In this paper, I shall use metonymy to explore the semantics of the deity, and I shall argue that Libitina was a liminal deity, whose position at the margins of the city was mirrored by her position at the margins of Roman polytheism. This shows the strong interconnection between language, urbanity and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the religious placemaking of the dead in the very dense and diverse metropolis of Rome in order to understand the role of the urban in the burial of the deceased in antiquity. In the Republican and Imperial periods in Rome, there is ample evidence of the impressive variety of sites and practices by which the dead were buried. However, the location of burial sites and the practices changed dynamically as they had to adapt not only to the growth of the city but also to new civic regulations, which were particularly focused on controlling public hygiene. The tension between the location of burial sites and their place biographies is made even more complex by the pomerium (sacred boundary) in Rome, an intangible and flexible boundary within which burials were forbidden. However, illegal and legal exceptions do exist. Therefore, the aim of this paper is not to provide an overview or classification of burial types, but to shed light on the role of the urban in influencing burial sites and rituals in order to identify where and how urban actors had to negotiate spaces and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses two deaths on the accommodation platform Airbnb to consider how the spatial understandings of digital infrastructures can have consequences for mortality. The platform internalizes each home or room as a Listing, a template of variables minimally describing space as a unit of accommodation. This universal schema facilitates both compatibility and scalability. But this generic understanding ignores both the unpredictable agency of matter and the significance of a space's sociocultural past. Thus, while acknowledging the force exerted by digital infrastructures in reconfiguring the political economies of space at a global level, this Perspective paper argues that space is not adequately apprehended unless its material and historical aspects are accounted for. The paper concludes by returning to mortality in a broad sense, questioning whether digital infrastructures support or inhibit our capacities for living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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According to what I will refer to as judgmentalist approaches to the fear of death (JFD), the fear of death conforms to the structure implied by judgmentalist theories of emotion. JFD holds that fears of death are constituted in part by evaluative judgments or beliefs about one's own death. Although many philosophers endorse JFD (explicitly or implicitly), there is good reason to believe that it may be problematic. For, there is a troubling (and, for the purposes of this discussion, rather interesting) objection to judgmentalist theories of emotion; if judgmentalism is false, then so too is JFD. In brief, the worry with judgmentalist theories is this: it is sometimes the case that one has an emotion, but holds a belief (or beliefs) that is in tension with the emotion. For example, I sometimes fear flying despite the fact that I believe flying is not dangerous. Emotions of this sort are often referred to as recalcitrant emotions, and they are widely thought to pose a serious challenge to judgmentalist theories. In this paper, I consider an objection to JFD based on the existence of recalcitrant bouts of the fear of death. I include in this discussion an Epicurean-inspired solution to the problem of emotional recalcitrance. Although I argue this solution may be ultimately unsuccessful, I believe it is still worth considering. For, in most discussions of the problem of emotional recalcitrance, philosophers abandon judgmentalism in favour of some other theory of emotion. The Epicurean-inspired solution I discuss in this paper, however, may allow one to retain one's commitment to judgmentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze the poems written in English by young, contemporary Kashmiri poets in an online platform called "The Kashmir Tales." Through textual analysis of these intensely personal poems, I argue, that these poems show the effects of trauma in a highly mystical language. In order to demonstrate this relationship of the poems with trauma, I interpret two prominent and recurrent motifs in the poems - prisons and the interplay of love and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper intended to review the data regarding the multipotential effects of the sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT 2) inhibitors, their cardiovascular effects, and their mechanism of action. The SGLT2 inhibitors exert their beneficial antidiabetic and cardioprotective effects through increased glucose excretion from the kidneys, blood pressure and weight lowering, vasodilation and other potential beneficial effects. They have been used for the treatment of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) as well as in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD), coronary artery disease (CAD),and heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). To get a better understanding of their mechanism of action for their multiple cardiovascular protective effects, a Medline search of the English language literature was conducted between 2015 and February 2022 and 46 pertinent papers were selected. The analysis of data clearly demonstrated that the use of the SGLT2 inhibitors besides their antidiabetic effects, provide additional protection against CVD, CAD, and HFrEF and HFpEF, and death, but not stroke, in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients. Therefore, they should be preferably used for the treatment of patients with T2DM with preexisting CVD, CAD, and HFrEF and HFpEF [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents stories of living with dead trees in Baltimore, MD, USA to explore where, how, and with whom tree remains become lively through art, farming, and sustainability practices. These stories serve as a lens into the diverse ways practitioners produce knowledge about death, healing, disease, and decay as they encounter and transform dead nonhuman bodies. I find that practitioners who work with dead trees develop a circular understanding of death, and propose that decay is needed to heal bodies and remediate land. However, when these everyday embodied knowledges are translated from the level of body to the city, death does not become lively for all. When circular ways of knowing death are applied to the city, death is displaced into vulnerable human and tree bodies showing that the sustainable city both relies on and (re)produces the binaries of life and death. As a contrast, practitioner knowledges of tree death suggest sustainabilities that trouble established notions of life and death, bodies and environments, health and disease, and decay and beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The approaching death of a member of a women’s monastic community set a series of rituals in motion. These rituals accompanied the sister from the end of her life through her death and finally to her interment. These began with the community gathering for the last moments of the sister’s life, through the preparation of the body for burial, the procession to the church and rituals there. They end with the burial of the sister and a procession by the community back to their church. How the rituals were performed – and who performed them, whether the sisters themselves or a priest – varied based on the order to which the house belonged. Further shape of these rituals and the texts that they used reflect an order’s understanding of death. This paper considers the rituals for the dying and the dead described in books belonging to two medieval women’s communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]