What's the episode about?

In this episode, get an overview of the 2025 Edited Collection Death and Institutions: Processes, Places and the Past

What is the Book About?

Institutions play a crucial role in shaping experiences of end-of-life care, dying, death, body disposal and bereavement. However, there has been little holistic or multidisciplinary research in this area, with studies typically focusing on individual settings such as hospitals and cemeteries, or being confined to specific disciplines.

This interdisciplinary collection combines chapters on process, place and the past to examine the relationships both within and between institutions, institutionalization and death in international contexts.

Of broad appeal to students and academics in areas including social policy, health sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, history and the wider humanities, this collection spans multiple disciplines to offer crucial insights into the end of life, body disposal, bereavement and mourning.

Introduction - Kate Woodthorpe, Helen Frisby and Bethan Michael-Fox

1. Culture as an Institution: Assessing Quality of Death in China - Chao Fang

2. The Market for Human Body Parts: Institutions,Intermediaries and Regulation - Lee Moerman and Sandra van der Laan

3. Secrecy, Judgement and Stigma: Assisted Dying inAotearoa New Zealand - Rhona Winnington

4.  Institutional Thoughtlessness: Prison as a Place forDying - Renske Visser

5. Out of the Ashes in New York City: Body StorageBottleneck in COVID-19's First Wave - Sally Raudon

6. Governing the Dead's Territory - Hajar Ghorbani

7.  'The Bluecoat Boys to Walk and Sing an Anthem before the Corpse': The Children of Christ's Hospital in London Funerals of the 18th Century - Dan O'Brien

8. Inside-Out and Outside-In: Learned Institutions andGarden Cemeteries in 19th-Century Britain - Lindsay Udall

9. ‘They Attached No Blame to the Staff in Charge': TheRole of Dublin Workhouse Administration in Preventing and Contributing to Institutional Mortality, 1872–1913 - Shelby Zimmerman

10.  Tenets and Tensions: A Critical Exploration of the Death Positive Movement - Anna Wilde

11.  Representations of Immortality and Institutions in 21st-Century Popular Culture - Devaleena Kundu and Bethan Michael-Fox

12. ‘I Was So Lost … and Who Brought You Back? Me.' - Deathstyle Gurus and the New Institutional Logics ofMourning on Instagram - Johanna Sumiala and Linda Pentikäinen

Afterword - Kate Woodthorpe, Helen Frisby and Bethan Michael-Fox

Want to publish with Bristol University Press and the Death and Culture series? Find out more.

How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists?

To cite this episode, you can use the following citation:

Woodthorpe, K., Frisby, H. and Michael-Fox, B. (2025) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R.Published 11 March 2025. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.28572215

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