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IntroductionAs early career researchers studying the end of life, we recognise that scholarly activity in the field of death studies -an umbrella term for research spanning all aspects of death, dying and bereavement, including end-of-life care -is growing in popularity. Since we completed our PhDs (less than 7 years ago), the number of UK universities offering courses on death-related topics has increased, mailing lists and online chat groups have multiplied, and the range of international seminars and conferences addressing topics in the field is expanding. This mounting interest in death studies makes this an opportune time to consider the methodological issues that doing research on death, dying and bereavement present.Mortality is a flagship journal in this interdisciplinary field. Read by both academics and practitioners, and with an increasingly international authorship and audience, it is an ideal space to consider contemporary methodological issues and challenges. As editors of this special issue, we have brought together a range of articles written by researchers which foreground and explore in detail matters pertaining to the study of death. As a collection, the articles seek to generate discussion about techniques, practices and sociocultural contexts of death research, and the implications that these have for knowledge production. Moreover, they intend to stimulate reflection on what is particular about engaging in death-related research specifically -teasing out key issues from more generic ongoing discussions about doing 'sensitive' (usually qualitative) research. In doing so, they offer practical tips and guidance -with the authors including key points and summary boxes at the end of each article. By placing these articles together and in dialogue with one another, we hope to encourage further substantive publications that deal with methodological aspects of death research, and that can continue these conversations.If we look at the genealogy of death studies (in English-speaking nations at least), there is a history of key periods of academic reflection and activity. For example, in the late 1960s and early 1970s (in the United States in particular), we saw a plethora of research in the field which produced seminal works that are still regularly cited in research, teaching and professional education today (e.
IntroductionAs early career researchers studying the end of life, we recognise that scholarly activity in the field of death studies -an umbrella term for research spanning all aspects of death, dying and bereavement, including end-of-life care -is growing in popularity. Since we completed our PhDs (less than 7 years ago), the number of UK universities offering courses on death-related topics has increased, mailing lists and online chat groups have multiplied, and the range of international seminars and conferences addressing topics in the field is expanding. This mounting interest in death studies makes this an opportune time to consider the methodological issues that doing research on death, dying and bereavement present.Mortality is a flagship journal in this interdisciplinary field. Read by both academics and practitioners, and with an increasingly international authorship and audience, it is an ideal space to consider contemporary methodological issues and challenges. As editors of this special issue, we have brought together a range of articles written by researchers which foreground and explore in detail matters pertaining to the study of death. As a collection, the articles seek to generate discussion about techniques, practices and sociocultural contexts of death research, and the implications that these have for knowledge production. Moreover, they intend to stimulate reflection on what is particular about engaging in death-related research specifically -teasing out key issues from more generic ongoing discussions about doing 'sensitive' (usually qualitative) research. In doing so, they offer practical tips and guidance -with the authors including key points and summary boxes at the end of each article. By placing these articles together and in dialogue with one another, we hope to encourage further substantive publications that deal with methodological aspects of death research, and that can continue these conversations.If we look at the genealogy of death studies (in English-speaking nations at least), there is a history of key periods of academic reflection and activity. For example, in the late 1960s and early 1970s (in the United States in particular), we saw a plethora of research in the field which produced seminal works that are still regularly cited in research, teaching and professional education today (e.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been (re)creating new global geographies of death, which specifically impact the Global South and expose its continuum of vulnerabilities – unequally distributed in terms of race, gender, class, and so on. In the Americas, we can identify the emergence of a new regional governance of death, associated with a set of practical recommendations by the Organization of American States (OAS) constraining states’ policy responses to COVID-19 and installing a new global governance lexicon. Recommendations concerning the disposal of dead bodies, full respect for both collective and family grief, and indications of alternative ways to conduct funerals and memorial services, for instance, seem to evoke new multilateral responses, paving the way for a new governance model: one that centres death within regional policymaking. This points to a change in the treatment of death from a purely private to a politically infused issue. Theoretically, this article aims to bridge the gap between Death Studies and Global Governance literatures. Supported by Michel Foucault’s genealogical method, the goal is to critically reconceptualise the meanings and framings of death landscapes in the Americas, pointing us to the correlation of forces that enabled the normative emergence of death in the OAS in this particular historical moment.
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