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Editorial

Allan Kellehear
Professor of Palliative Care School of Public Health La Trobe University Melbourne

Article Text

I am very pleased to introduce HSR readers to this special issue on death and dying. Seven excellent papers appear in this issue examining a range of contemporary issues and questions from bereavement and the (mis)management of dying to the role of the body or death denial in policy formulation or media representation.

I am especially pleased to see in this issue a preponderance of Australian contributors. Like many other countries, the field of death and dying began by being dominated by medical and psychological perspectives in these topic areas. Now, social approaches to theory development, criticism or empirical studies are establishing a significant place alongside these other views. This is clearly happening in Australia now no less than in other countries that have longer sociological traditions in the study of death, most notably the United Kingdom and the USA.

It is also worth noting that although hospice and palliative care has experienced rapid rise and development in the last 30 years the interest in the study of death and dying from these colleagues remain modest. It remains true that the most significant number of empirical studies of death and dying as well as theoretical contributions continue to come from the social sciences and not, rather disappointingly, from palliative care researchers.

Palliative care remains focused on a health services agenda of research that continually promotes a concern with the body, its symptoms and management, and the problem of service design and delivery. Studies of carers remain greater than studies of people at the very centre of the service: the dying and bereaved.

In sociology, research questions about death and dying have been closely identified with health - as they still are - but the current range of articles in this issue does remind readers, who may usually research outside these topics, that sociological concerns about death are inclusive of questions and theories beyond health.

The current articles demonstrate a concern for social movements, stratification, media and technology, policy-making, and the sociology of the body, religion and culture. Death and dying are linked to many concerns within the world of health and medicine but they also explore pressing questions and concerns in epistemology, the sociology of knowledge, or the politics of identity. The history of political power and authority in Late Modernity, the politics of embodiment, or even the career politics of studying death and dying as an academic, are all discussed in this issue.

There is much to do in this still very new field of the social sciences. There is a pressing need for more studies of death, dying and loss in poverty, remembering that demographically speaking, most death and dying occurs in developing countries and not our own affluent, cancer-obsessed nations. More studies are needed on the impact of total institutions on aging and dying, particularly in nursing homes. New forms of the medicalisation of death, such as the rise of brain death criteria and politics of organ donation, require greater social science curiosity and scrutiny.

More studies of dying and bereavement, from the point of view of the experiencer rather than their carers, remain an important though challenging need if our understanding about human mortality is to free itself from the current restricted epistemology and views of professionals.

There is much to do in this exciting, under-researched, but vitally important field. After all, as theorists from Freud and Malinowski to Bauman and Elias have argued, an understanding of how we die is often the sharpest reflection of our current politics of life.



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Volume 18/2
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Special Issues

Ageing, Anti-Ageing and Globalization: Transitions and limits in the governance of ageing
Vol 18/4, 1st Dec 2009


Expert Patient Policy
Vol 18/2, 1st Jun 2009


Social Determinants of Child Health and Wellbeing
Vol 18/1, 1st Mar 2009


Integrative, Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Challenges for Biomedicine?
Vol 17/4, 1st Dec 2008


Community, Family, Citizenship and the Health of LGBTIQ People
Vol 17/3, 1st Oct 2008


Re-imagining Preventive Health: Theoretical Perspectives
Vol 17/2, 1st Aug 2008


Death, Dying and Loss in the 21st Century
Vol 16/5, 1st Dec 2007


Social Equity and Health
Vol 16/2, 1st Jun 2007


Medical Dominance Revisited
Vol 15/5, 1st Dec 2006


Childbirth, Politics & the Culture of Risk
Vol 15/4, 1st Oct 2006


Revisiting Sexualities and Health
Vol 15/3, 1st Aug 2006


Closing Asylums for the Mentally Ill: Social Consequences
Vol 14/3, 1st Dec 2005


Workplace Health: The Injuries of Neoliberalism
Vol 14/1, 1st Aug 2005


Symposium on Rural Health: Patients and Practitioners
Vol 13/2, 1st Dec 2004


Symposium on Women's Health
Vol 13/1, 1st Sep 2004


Symposium on Indigenous Health and the Contribution of Sociology
Vol 10/2, 1st Nov 2001


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Selected Articles

Body in time: Timeless body a patchwork of thoughts
Eberhard Wenzel


Bad News
Lekkie Hopkins


Strategies for Teaching the Sociological Imagination to Medical Students
Simon Kitto


Lesbian and Queer Mothers Navigating the Adoption System
Lori Ross, Rachel Epstein, Corrie Goldfinger, Leah Steele, Scott Anderson, Carol Strike


Avoiding Death
Kay Price, Julianne Cheek DipT, BEd, PhD


Long-Distance Migrants and Family Support
Cora Vellekoop Baldock


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