Covid-19 and Death Studies

This book examines the profound impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on how people experienced dying, death and bereavement from early 2020 onwards. This interdisciplinary collection draws together international examples rooted in empirical research from death studies scholars to make sense of these impacts. The collection includes a wide range of insights from how personal and societal responses to the pandemic shaped the ways people talked and thought about death, to the provision of palliative and intensive care, and changes in funerary practices. The book demonstrates how social responses to the pandemic shaped death in this historical moment and explores potential lasting legacies, such as altered rituals. Curated from articles originally published in the journal Mortality with a new preface by the editors, this collection showcases why death studies is crucial for understanding not only the COVID-19 pandemic but also future pandemics and mass death events. This volume will be essential reading for students, scholars, healthcare professionals, public health researchers and grief counsellors in medical anthropology, medical humanities, thanatology, sociology, bereavement studies and palliative care. The chapters in this book were originally published in Mortality.

Erica Borgstrom is a Professor of Medical Anthropology at The Open University in the United Kingdom. She was Mortality Co-Editor-in-Chief from 2020 to 2024. Bethan Michael-Fox is Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at The Open University in the United Kingdom. She has been the Mortality Managing Editor since 2020. Arnar Árnason is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He is Mortality Co-Editor-in-Chief.

Introduction 1. A thematic analysis investigating the impact of COVID-19 on the way people think and talk about death and dying 2. Photographic narratives of Covid-19 during Spain's state of emergency: images of death, dying and grief 3. Death anxiety and materialism during the pandemic: investigating the role of personal experiences of COVID-19 4. Death acceptance among Lodha older adults: their perceptions of 'good death' during the COVID-19 pandemic 5. Wishes for a good death in context of the COVID-19 pandemic - perspective of older individuals living in Finland 6. 'I can't breathe': the biopolitics and necropolitics of breath during 2020 7. Vaccinating capitalism: racialised value in the COVID-19 economy 8. Regulating exposure: routine deaths, work and the Covid crisis 9. Palliative accompaniment: biomedical and social resignification of dying during the COVID-19 pandemic 10. 'Thank you for helping me remember a nightmare I wanted to forget': qualitative interviews exploring experiences of death and dying during COVID-19 in the UK for nurses redeployed to ICU 11. Family narratives of loss and grief during the COVID-19 pandemic in Botswana 12. Life stories interrupted: an exploration of United States obituaries during the COVID-19 pandemic 13. 'The most difficult time of my life' or 'COVID's gift to me'? Differential experiences of COVID-19 funerary restrictions in Aotearoa New Zealand