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Death Café is a not-for-profit international social franchise founded in 2011 in London. This paper is based on the most extensive empirical research of Death Cafés to date, examining the content of Death Café conversations. I interrogate the finding that, alongside talking directly about death and dying, people at a Death Café consistently talk about the value of being at a Death Café and about the value of talking about death. I introduce three main ways that talking about the value of conversations about death appears in a Death Café and, most importantly, I argue that talking about the value of conversations about death is an enjoyable part of the conversation in its own right. I use neo-tribal theory and its concept of aesthetics as ‘a way of feeling in common’ and ‘a means of recognising ourselves’ to examine this further. When talking about the value of conversations about death, Death Café participants reflexively consider the activity they are engaging in= together, which strengthens the feeling of collectivity, and bonds them into a neo-tribe. This paper demonstrates that Death Café is a valued form of social interaction, moving it away from the current academic attempts to discover Death Café’s instrumental utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research about dying is viewed as inherently sensitive because of how death is perceived in many societies. Such framing assumes participants are 'vulnerable' and at risk of 'harm' from research. Simultaneously, with increasing recognition of the importance of reflexivity, researchers can become (deeply) preoccupied with their actions and experiences in the field. Whilst reflexivity is often described as a helpful process, in this paper we consider when introspection becomes problematic and even harmful for death researchers, in both a professional and personal sense. Identifying a process we call 'internalising sensitivity' the paper describes our own experiences of working and living with the pervasive ethical notions of sensitivity, vulnerability, risk and harm. We argue that these discourses can get 'under the skin' of researchers in that they impact researchers intellectually, emotionally, and physically, and this in turns affects their relationship with the research process and their place within, and beyond it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile methodology has long been adopted in social science as a data collection tool and there is an established industry focused on cemeteries and ghost walks as a novel and appealing way to engage audiences in mortality. However, death studies have rarely sought to embrace mobile methods as an opportunity for innovation in teaching to enhance Higher Education (HE) student learning. This paper will reflect on the value and potential of adapting mobile methods to become mobile learning, an innovative pedagogic approach enabling the teaching of mortality to become an immersive experience of ‘learning on the move’ using mobile technology. Learning on the move has, I will demonstrate, a range of benefits for participants. These include the stimulation of the thanatological imagination and the schooling of participants to communicate effectively and sensitively about death, dying and the dead. I will explore the significance of mobile learning through the York Death and Culture Walk (DaCWalk), an open access self-guided fully podcasted walk through the centre of one of the UK’s oldest cities. The walk is designed to enable HE student walkers to experience embodied learning as they come to both know and understand mortality in a historic urban space. Mobile learning is argued to be a powerful innovation as a pedagogic tool for teaching and learning about death, dying and the dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction provides some insights on this special issue of Mortality, entitled Dying and Death in Former Communist European Countries, setting the issue against the general background of death studies and, more specifically, of death studies in eastern European countries. Some relevant references to the Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe International Conference, organised in Romania, at the '1 Decembrie 1918ʹ University of Alba Iulia, Romania, between 2007 and 2019, are also made. The rationale and also the limitations of this special issue are brought into attention. The papers that form this issue are briefly presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National days of mourning are state-sponsored rituals of collective grief enacted in the public sphere by political authorities to symbolically mark and emotionally cope with a socially significant loss. These officially declared and ceremonially performed state rituals of communion in grief provide privileged epistemic opportunities for unravelling the politics of grievability underpinning a society's willingness to mourn its dead. This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting two case studies – the Colectiv nightclub fire and the flu epidemics – in order to grasp the politics of national mourning in the Romanian post-communist context. After identifying the criteria of grievability underlying the declaration of national mourning in cases of mass death as consisting in a 'chronotopic togetherness' in death that is characterised by an 'instantaneity of emotional shock,' the paper argues for enlarging these criteria of grievability so as to include the victims of socially invisible traumas inflicted by structural violence, such as those killed in epidemics and car road accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of death studies has a rich interdisciplinary history but little scholarship examining the process of interdisciplinary collaboration. The development of, and inquiry into, a more rigorously interdisciplinary death studies is a topical pursuit. The aim of this paper is to shed critical light on researcher experiences in an interdisciplinary collaboration on the topics of dying, death of grief, and examine what possibilities and challenges it prefaces for future interdisciplinary research in the field. An interdisciplinary study group called Exploring Narratives of Death (END) is examined over a period of one year through participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The conclusion is that researchers strongly advocate for more interdisciplinary agendas in death studies in order to develop greater intellectual advancement in the field and/or practical application of research in society. However, a lack of structural and temporal latitude in researchers' professional roles in the university could inhibit their ability to perform such research in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on data from fieldwork conducted in the EURAC – Institute for Mummies and the Iceman (Bozen, Italy). I observed the way in which the researchers related themselves to the object of their study: ancient human remains and through the analysis of the researchers’ relationship to such remains, I argue that, contrary to what is generally stated in archaeological literature, human remains were not considered emotionally charged materials to which respect was owed in virtue of their former humanity. In particular, I will show how, in the context of the research facility in which I conducted my observations, human remains were removed from any association with the concept of death as such, for ancient skeletons and mummies were not understood to be conventional ‘dead’. My work ultimately constitutes an attempt to challenge the human/non-human dichotomy by arguing that the entity, which is brought into being through bioanthropological analysis, eludes canonical categorisations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses the field of death studies including publications about the emotional nature of conducting sensitive research, implications for researchers and ethics committees, and lack of career structure for researchers.

An interview conducted with Emeritus professor Karla Holloway on the African American funeral director as preservers of culture and history illuminates her scholarship and importance to the field of Death Studies. Questions asked in order to understand her interdisciplinary academic background and her canonical book Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, A Memorial were received with answers on how her knowledge of language and letters provide important understandings of death and dying in broad and heterogenous African American communities. Holloway shared her own personal grief narratives and how they inform her work by disclosing her purposeful and continual use of the term 'Vilomah' which she borrowed from Sanskit as a way to bring comfort to those who have lost a child. Ultimately, the interview showcases how premature loss in African American communities, inclusive to children and adults, lead to creative and distinctive rituals and memorial work – work born of trauma and pain but also resistance and resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this article, published in an earlier issue of this journal, provided an overview of how the death-denial thesis took shape and spread in the social sciences between the 1930s and 1980s. By 'death-denial thesis' we refer to the assumption according to which Western societies seek to deny the reality of death. In this second part of the article, we turn our attention to the most extensive critiques addressed to the said thesis. We attempt to assess the present state of the narrative and to outline how its apparent obsolescence today opens new avenues of exploration for death studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following is a two-part article on the 'death-denial' thesis, namely the assumption that modern Western societies seek to deny and conceal the reality of death. The first part of the article gives a chronological overview of Anglophone and French literature on the thesis, focussing on its development and pervasiveness in the disciplines of history and sociology. In the second part of the article, published in a subsequent issue of this journal, we summarise the critiques to the said thesis. We also assess its present state in the social sciences and point to new paths for the future of death studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Western culture, death has been widely censured because of its conceptual implications; it lies at the boundaries between reductionism and metaphysics. There is not yet an efficacious epistemology able to solve this contraposition and its consequent collision with science and tradition. This article analyzes Near Death Experiences (NDEs) as a prototypical argument in which the two perspectives conflict. Specifically, it analyzes the epistemological antinomies of the ontological representations of death, inhering in passage versus absolute annihilation. Indeed, the NDEs theme permits the examination of the logical contradiction between monistic reductionism and its ontological counterpart to improve the discovery of a new paradigm that integrates the ecological with eternalist views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]