And now the end is near: enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning

Abstract

A new body of scholarship on death and loss has emerged as a sub-field within social and cultural geography. This work has done much to draw geographers’ attention to questions of death, dying and remembrance and likewise to bring a spatial perspective to interdisciplinary death studies. Whilst deathscapes have been framed within geographical work as incorporating material, embodied and virtual spaces, to date Anglo-American and European studies have tended to focus on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. With a number of important exceptions, embodied and dynamic experiences of dying, death and survival have been absent within the geographies of death. This special section aims to broaden the scope, and to resist simple dichotomies of life and death, and to be especially attentive to the embodied and visceral experiences, practices and processes of dying, death and survival. In this introduction, we explore themes of dying/s, death/s and survival/s across varied international, national and cultural contexts, as discussed in the contributing papers and raised by the politics of recent events. This collection offers an expanded and enlivened approach to research, documenting facing death/s, journeys at the end of life, living through, on and with life-limiting illnesses, living with loss and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences and practices evoke for individuals and wider social groups. They open up new spaces of P/politics and emotions, challenging limited political and medicalized frames. The papers also raise methodological questions and present a challenging agenda for future research. This special section grew out of sessions we organized for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh.

Un nouvel ensemble de recherche sur la mort et la perte est né comme sous-groupe dans le domaine de la géographie sociale et culturelle. Ce travail a beaucoup contribué à attirer l’attention des géographes sur les questions de la mort, du trépas et du souvenir et à apporter ainsi une perspective spatiale aux études interdisciplinaires de la mort. Alors que les paysages de la mort ont été encadrés à l’intérieur du travail géographique en incorporant les espaces matériels, incarnés et virtuels, jusqu’à présent les études anglo-américaines et européennes ont eu tendance à se concentrer sur les espaces littéraux et représentatifs de la fin de la vie, des sites de dépouilles mortelles et de commémoration. A un certain nombre d’importantes exceptions près, les expériences incarnées et dynamiques du trépas, de la mort et de la survie sont absentes dans les géographies de la mort. Cette édition spéciale a pour but d’élargir la perspective, et de résister aux simples dichotomies de la vie et de la mort, et d’être particulièrement attentifs face aux expériences incarnées et viscérales, aux pratiques et processus du trépas, de la mort et de la survie. Dans cette introduction, nous explorons les thèmes du/des trépas, de la/des mort(s) et de la/des survie(s) dans divers contextes internationaux, nationaux et culturels, tels qu’ils sont traités dans les articles publiés et soulevés par les politiques d’événements récents. Cette collection offre une approche élargie et revitalisée à la recherche, en documentant la confrontation à la mort/aux morts, les voyages de fin de vie, l’expérience de la vie à travers, pendant et avec des maladies limitant l’espérance de vie, la vie après la perte et les spatialités interconnectées que ces expériences et pratiques évoquent pour les individus et les groupes sociaux de manière plus élargie. Elles ouvrent de nouveaux espaces de P/politiques et d’émotions, et défient les cadres politiques et médicalisés limités. Les articles soulèvent aussi des questions méthodologiques et présentent un programme stimulant pour la recherche du futur. Cette édition spéciale est née de sessions que nous avons organisées pour la conférence annuelle internationale (Royal Geography Society – Institute of British Geographies) à l’université d’Edimburgh.

Una nueva área de investigación sobre la muerte y la pérdida ha surgido como un sub-campo dentro de la geografía social y cultural. Este trabajo ha hecho mucho para llamar la atención de geógrafos a preguntas relacionadas con la muerte, el morir y el recuerdo y, de la misma forma, para traer una perspectiva espacial a los estudios interdisciplinarios de la muerte. Mientras que el espacio de la muerte ha sido enmarcado dentro del trabajo geográfico como material que incorpora, y espacio corporal y virtual, hasta la fecha los estudios anglo-americanos y europeos han tendido a centrarse en los espacios literales y de representación del final de la vida, sitios de restos mortales y conmemoración. Con una serie de excepciones importantes, las experiencias corporales y dinámicas de morir, muerte y supervivencia han estado ausentes en las geografías de muerte. Esta edición especial tiene por objeto ampliar la perspectiva, resistir dicotomías simples de vida y muerte, y prestar especialmente atención a experiencias, prácticas y procesos de morir, muerte y supervivencia corporales y viscerales. En esta introducción, se exploran temas relacionados con el morir, la muerte y la supervivencia a ​​través de variados contextos internacionales, nacionales y culturales, discutidos en los documentos que contribuyen al trabajo e introducidos por la política de acontecimientos recientes. Esta colección ofrece un enfoque de investigación ampliado y actualizado, documentando el enfrentamiento a la muerte, los procesos al final de la vida, viviendo a través de, en y con enfermedades mortales, el vivir con la pérdida y las espacialidades interconectadas que estas experiencias y prácticas evocan en los individuos y grupos sociales más amplios. Se abren nuevos espacios de P/política y emociones, desafiando marcos políticos y dentro de la medicina limitados. Los documentos también plantean cuestiones metodológicas y presentan una agenda desafiante para la investigación futura. Esta edición especial surgió de las sesiones que se organizaron para la Conferencia Internacional Anual RGS-IBG 2012 en la Universidad de Edimburgo.

Keywords:

• deathscapes
• dying
• loss
• bereavement
• mourning
• Global South

Mots clés:

• paysages de la mort
• trépas
• perte
• perte d’un être cher
• deuil
• hémisphère sud

Palabras clave:

• Espacio de la muerte
• Morir
• Pérdida
• Duelo
• Luto
• Países en vía de desarrollo

In the UK, on 14 May 2014, Stephen Sutton died. He died a very public death, which captured the public’s imagination not least because he was 19-years old. Stephen was diagnosed with cancer when he was 15, and when told of his poor prognosis, he wrote a ‘bucket list’, containing 46 things he wanted to achieve. This included raising £10,000 for the Teenage cancer trust (TCT), a charity that had supported him throughout his cancer treatment. He made ‘Stephen’s Story’ and published it on Facebook. Interest in his activities grew, not least in response to his positive approach to the situation he faced: he stated ‘this is not a sob story, this is Stephen’s Story’ (Sutton, 2015, http://stephensstory.co.uk/). His experiences were (re)posted on numerous social media sites that became vectors through which many in the UK and beyond followed his activities. His own attitude towards life shifted from the temporal to the active and performative: ‘I don’t see the point in measuring life in terms of time anymore. I’d rather measure life in terms of making a difference’ (TCT, 2015, www.teenagecancertrust.org). His overriding courage and altruism, and attempt to contribute to a future he would not see humbled many. On 22nd April 2014, he posted an image on Twitter of himself with his thumbs up in a hospital bed and the statement: ‘I’ve done well to blag things as well as I have up till now, but unfortunately I think this is just one hurdle too far’ (@_StephensStory, 2014). This was Stephen publically sharing what was thought to be the end of his life. This tweet went ‘viral’ across social media and alongside messages of support people donated money to TCT. This sharing of the end of life challenged multiple taboos, but also highlights how even the dying can be subject to bullying and abuse online: the fact that Stephen did not die immediately prompted a backlash by some on social media; a small and often anonymous minority claimed they had been ‘duped’ by him. Stephen responded with a tweet ‘Sorry to disappoint you! So you know, I still have my cancer and it’s incurable, if that makes you feel less “duped” x’ (@_StephensStory, 2014). Stephen was readmitted to hospital a couple of weeks later, and subsequently died. Stephen raised over £5 million for TCT.

Stephen’s story raises interesting issues around ‘necropolitics’: the openness and sharing of experiences through social media defies common Western taboos, yet rearticulates the notion of death as a distant event. In this case, the journey towards death was visible and accessible through social media, but remained at a safe distance for followers, with some of the messiness revealed, whilst self-censorship meant that other aspects were hidden, the narrative’s ability to disrupt kept within safe parameters.

The 2013 Ebola outbreak first appeared in southern Guinea, and spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone at a rapid pace. At the time of writing, the World Health Organization estimates that there have been a total of over 27,000 cases and over 11,000 deaths in these three countries from this outbreak of the virus (WHO, 2015). Place specific in patterning, transmission and treatment, West Africa has been, by far, the most a/effected, but it was not until mid-2014 that local concerns turned into global headlines and social media hyperbole: ‘Ebola: The ISIS of biological agents’ (The Metro, 2014); ‘UK nurse brings Ebola back to Britain’ (Daily Mail, 2014); ‘The United States must immediately institute strong travel restrictions or Ebola will be all over the United States – a plague like no other!’ (@realDonaldTrump, 2014). This commentary helped to shape the way geography, living, dying and death was imagined, understood and thus addressed in the Global North. Cultural beliefs and practices associated with West Africa, such as caring for the dying at home and ancestral funeral and burial practices, were implicated in fears of transmission. Mobile populations, porous borders and air travel were also deemed high-risk factors, prompting fears that the disease was hyper-mobile, spreading at an alarming rate beyond country boarders (WHO, 2015). Four diagnoses of Ebola inside the United States and the transportation of small numbers of foreign aid and health workers with Ebola to be treated in European and American hospitals raised further fears. In contrast to deaths in Africa, at the time of writing, only 24 cases of Ebola had been treated outside Africa with two patients dying in the United States, two more in Spain and one in Germany (BBC, 2015). The high visibility of these deaths supported the case to reshape US and European domestic affairs, including the introduction of screening programmes at international airports and changes to national guidance for hospitals and funeral directors on handling the remains of ‘Ebola-infected nationals’ and their possessions (e.g. UK PHE, 2015). As a result, bodies were presented as vectors of disease; funereal and burial practices singled out as fuelling contagion; and references to the deep-seated cultural trait of ‘compassion for the dying’ as virus spreading – all of which underscore the need for scholarship to critically engage with multi-scalar, international, bio-political and material processes of death/s, dying/s and surviving/s.

The Mediterranean, Europe’s key holiday region, is dubbed the ‘blue border’ of the European Union (EU), and, like the ‘green land border’ at its Eastern edge, is policed by neighbouring member states and by Frontex, the Pan-EU border security force. It is estimated that over 3329 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2015 alone (IOM, 2015). This is a continuation of a now well-established annual season of irregular migration as undocumented or non-visa-holding migrants make clandestine entry to the EU, including across the Mediterranean. Refugees and economic migrants pay smugglers for passage in inadequate and/or overloaded boats, in order to reach the outlying islands of EU states. Hence, the fishing communities and holiday destinations of Lesbos, Kos and Lampedusa have become key sites of an incongruous intermeshing of holidaying Europeans and life-risking non-European irregular migrants; their seas and beaches mass deathscapes. Some 4 million refugees have fled the Syrian conflict to neighbouring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan since March 2011; the numbers seeking refuge in Western Europe grew in the summer (June–Aug) of 2014, but escalated in 2015 to what was described by UNHCR (2015) as the greatest number of refugees fleeing from a single conflict ‘for a generation’, and the largest movement of refugees in post-war Europe. The nature and scale of the conflict itself and the insecurity of already bereft lives lived in inadequate refugee camps might be considered crisis enough. However, the prospect of the relative security offered by refugee status within the EU has prompted hundreds of thousands to risk not only their own lives, but those of their spouses, children and wider families, via sea- and land-crossings to EU countries. Whilst European governments and populations were immobilized by the cultural, economic and political threat of this quarter of a million people appealing for asylum in the summer of 2015 (less than a quarter of those taking refuge in Turkey alone), people were dying trying to breach the cordon of the EU. It was this death toll, and especially the death of children, most particularly that of Alyan and Galip Kurdi, along with their mother, Rehan, that brought a human face to the tragedy, and in doing so prompted both unilateral and collective action by EU member states. Here, one family’s tragedy was both product of and catalyst for geopolitical relations and practices. The EU’s decision to receive Syrian refugees was symbolized as much by the grassroots humanitarian response of ‘Refugees Welcome Here’, as the policies made by statespeople. It was also a counterbalance to existing European xenophobia, whilst simultaneously pandering to that xenophobia: privileging Syrian refugees over others created a hierarchy of ‘deserving’ versus ‘undeserving’ migrants, which both obscured and made non-grievable (see Butler, 2004) the deaths of those ‘not-Syrian’, ‘not refugee’ migrants who also died in the Mediterranean and crossing other EU borders at the same time.

The papers in this special section address geographies of death/s, dying/s and remembrance/s and are based on contributions to sessions on the same subject at the Annual International Conference of the RGS-IBG (2012) at the University of Edinburgh. The three cases and contexts of death above have each emerged in the interim, whilst the papers below were being written, reviewed and revised. Each interpellated the endeavour of producing this special section and so called to be included; even when presented as vignettes, as here, they highlight the significance and politics of geographical location as site, cause and mediation of death, as well as the mobilization of different spatial practices and strategies in the face of death/s, dying/s and bereavement/s. In doing so, they each resonate with the papers below which collectively highlight the power, agency and limitations of varied spaces, social and spatial practices, and the often inherent political nature of death and mourning across the world (see Sidaway, 2009).

Death and bereavement are inevitably central to everyday life across cultures, although associated social and cultural practices vary by time and place, ranging from sequestered social taboo to an integral part of ongoing social life. To date, Anglo-American and European academic studies of death and bereavement have been dominated by Western practices, socio-economic contexts, worldviews and models, e.g. the numerous successive psychosocial frameworks for coping with grief and loss. Put simply, within Western culture, dying and death is typically framed as a medicalized physical event sequestered in morgues, hospitals, hospices and funeral homes; the social, financial and emotional impacts for those left behind, are recognized at one level, but the bereaved are expected to continue everyday life after a short ‘normal’ period of grieving. Although this narrow framing is beginning to be challenged, more work is needed on other aspects related to dying and death, including facing death/s, journeys towards the end of life and the interconnected spatialities that these experiences evoke for individuals and wider societies, across varied international, national and cultural contexts. Likewise, existing death studies and discourses have tended to privilege temporal dimensions of dying and mourning. This singular frame has begun to be broadened by a ‘spatial turn’ in death studies, evidenced by multi-disciplinary collections, such as ‘Deathscapes’ (Maddrell & Sidaway, 2010b) or the ‘The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality’ (Hockey, Komaromy, & Woodthorpe, 2010), which have sought to highlight the spatial dimensions of death and remembrance, and include the work of some geographers.

Within geography, a growing body of scholarship on death and loss is emerging. There is a long tradition of studying mortality rates and associated statistics within population geography to inform government policy and NGO interventions. Similarly, mapping death has long been an important preoccupation of epidemiologists and health geographers, quantifying and visualizing varying rates of disease and mortality within and between counties (e.g. Dorling, 1997; Dorling & Gunnell, 2003). Historical geography has engaged with cultures and spaces of death, through a focus on battlefields, cemeteries and memorials (e.g. Brown, 2013; McGeachan, 2014; Herman, 2010; Kong, 1999) as a way to provide commentary on issues of social class, spatial ordering and social and cultural change. A disparate body of geographical work on death, bereavement and remembrance exists, focusing on sites of death, (Brown & Colton, 2001; Maddrell & Sidaway, 2010; Morris & Thomas, 2005; Yarwood, Sidaway, Kelly, & Stillwell, 2015); (online) memorialization, (Kong, 2012; Maddrell, 2012a; Till, 2005; Wells, 2012); commemoration, continuing bonds and ghostly presences amongst the living (Holloway, 2006, 2010; Holloway & Kneale, 2008; Maddrell, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011, 2012b; Pile, 2005; Wylie, 2009; and see May, 2010 on zombie bodies); absence and presence (Maddrell, 2013; Parr & Stevenson, 2013; Romanillos, 2011); the limits to bio-political citizenship (Cadman, 2009); meanings of the mobile dead body (Young & Light, 2013); and bodily repatriation (Jassal, 2015). Despite this varied corpus of research, it leaves a myriad of possibilities for analyses of the intersections between emotions, materiality, identities, gender, ethnicity, power-relations and the contested nature of space. For example, significant exploration of the personal impacts of death, those close to dying, and those whose lives continue have yet to be fully explored in social and cultural geography. Despite allied interests in health, medicine, ageing and the life course, geographers have also been slower or perhaps too reticent to engage with the actual embodied and visceral experiences of dying, death and surviving and associated boundaries, ruptures, ripples and vulnerabilities these create. Further, the diverse rituals associated with death merit further consideration within geography (see Pitte, 2004), as do practices beyond the Anglo-American nexus (for exceptions see Evans, Ribbens McCarthy, Bowlby, Wouango, & Kébé, 2015; Hartig & Dunn, 1998; Kong, 1999, 2012). The inherent spatialities of practices associated with death/s, dying/s, surviving/s and remembering/s leave considerable scope for geographers not only to explore new and nuanced perspectives on space and place in relation to death/s, dying/s, mourning/s and ongoing life for the bereaved, but also to draw this body of work together as it relates to existing research agendas on geographies of identity, including gender, class, ethnicity and intersectionality; intergenerationality; forced and voluntary migration; political, economic and environmental crises; memorial landscapes and practices; sacred space and performances; emotion and affect.

When reading the papers in this special section, we invite readers to actively reflect on the e/affect these texts have on them. Reflecting a reader’s own personal experiences and worldviews, this may be uncomfortable, reassuring, ambiguous, or have no e/affect at all. We accept there is no singular way to respond; nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the variety of feelings evoked in the emotional work of reading the content and to reflect on their implications. Additionally, the emotional labour of researching and writing about dying/s, death/s and survival/s can raise complex ethical and personal issues for the researcher and participants. Whilst in other fields of practice forms of supervision are readily available to support the multiple complexities that may be raised, particularly for those actively engaged in death practices or death studies. Geographers should be attentive to the need for care for research participants and also how our research topics, methodologies and subsequent work e/affects us as researchers.

Situating dying/s, death/s and survival/s within geography

Reflecting the focus of this journal, this assemblage of papers reports timely and original research of social and cultural issues. They encompass and articulate both the mundane and more-than-mundane geographies of dying/s, death/s and survival/s through a close attention to life-shortening illness, attempted suicide, mourning practices and migrant experiences that both shape and are shaped by individuals, communities and states. The papers connect through nuances of vulnerabilities, absences and loss, building on and offering a complementary and alternative perspective to the existing literatures, whilst attending to the importance of place-making and experience as an active practice. More specifically, the papers raise questions about the boundaries of life and death (Madge, McNiven and Stevenson), legal-political practices (Hunter and McNiven) and move beyond an Anglo-American focus (Maddrell, Hunter and Dunn). The papers present aspects of the corporeal that disrupt understandings of dying and death as a purely medicalized event to provide a spatial and temporal articulation that shows the hidden ripple effects of loss and survival (Hunter, McNiven, Madge and Stevenson), and explores how mourning processes (McNiven and Maddrell), associated practices (Dunn) and the desire for memorialization (Hunter) are lived and experienced at a range of temporal and spatial scales in different geographical locales. Through a focus on the empirical and embodied, nuanced understandings of the virtual and material, expressions of loss, mourning and remembrance are charted as dynamic and active processes that intersect with geographies of emotion, identity, politics and the ‘more-than-representational’ (McNiven and Maddrell). Significantly, ‘cathartic methodologies’ (Madge) offer opportunities to rearticulate dying, death and living and the associated experiences and practices, to show how creative practice and survivor testimonies (Stevenson) have the potential to act as a vehicle for exploring and communicating personal geographies and as a way to live with and transform trauma. The intersection of cultural practices of death, bodily disposal and remembrance with global concerns, such as international migration, also highlight the social and political relevance of these issues.

In the first paper, Avril Maddrell’s agenda-setting piece (2016) opens up debates in geography and death studies by offering a conceptual framework for mapping grief. Going beyond spaces of bodily disposal and memorial culture, she recognizes that any framework for mapping grief needs to make visible the dynamic spatialities of grief, bereavement, mourning and remembrance in relation to experiences, identities and worldviews. Focused on the self-other-place nexus across a range of overlapping spaces and scales, including the physical, the virtual and the embodied-psychological, Maddrell is attentive to particular socio-economic, gender, religious, ethnic and cultural-political factors as she explores each spatiality in turn. Her paper evidences the relational and processual potential of maps, offering an exploratory conceptual and theory building tool that can show changes in experience over time. Maddrell’s ‘Mapping Grief’ illustrates the dynamic nature of individual/collective and internal/external time–space relations and social practices that underlie the emotional geographies of grief, mourning and remembrance. Aware of how her suggestion for a conceptual framework might be perceived as at odds with an experiential emotional geographies agenda, her paper highlights how cartographies are a window into the messy, shifting and multi-layered experiential geographies of living with loss across the life course. Her paper offers a new schema and initial vocabulary for articulating the spatial dimensions of bereavement that have previously been marginalized or ignored, and has further potential to provide insights to other life events and losses.

Like Maddrell, Olivia Stevenson’s paper (2016) highlights the multiple mappings of suicide, in recognition of the failure to include suicide attempts in geographical scholarship. Her paper engages directly with the visceral experiences of attempted suicide as told through the voices of suicide survivors. Drawing on interviews with adults (who had been reported missing), she found that attempted suicide was a significant part of their life journeys and yet rarely had their attempts been acknowledged. In her paper, she suggests the reasons for this is a dominant preoccupation with positioning suicide and suicide attempts through representations of pathology strongly linked to mental health. Her paper recognizes the connections between suicide and mental health, but suggests that engaging beyond narrowly framed medico-spatial models opens up the possibilities for understanding suicide as socio-spatial process. Outlining suicide attempts as highly geographic, Stevenson proposes a set of processes that encompass why, how, where and when persons experience suicide attempts provides a greater contextual understanding of the move to do, act and live on from them. Stevenson illustrates this through the testimonies of three suicide survivors who talk with her about their geographical journeys as a succession of ordinary places, bodily materialities and visceral experiences. In her attempts to listen attentively to survivors whilst also wishing to bring the reader closer to knowing ‘something of what it is like to be suicidal’, Stevenson draws our attention to death and dying as vibrant and vital; something close to us all, rather than a distant happening. Stevenson concludes by arguing that there is a need to broaden binary understandings of life and death and instead consider death work as active practice.

Clare Madge’s paper (2016) also calls for more vibrant accounts of ‘livingdying’ to be a feature of geographical scholarship. In response to often emotionally sanitized accounts of dying and death within existing geographical literatures, Madge offers a refreshing counter and explores the embodied emotions involved in death studies through a creative cathartic autobiographical account from her personal experiences of living through, on and with breast cancer. Her ‘fleshy and emotional cancer journey’ aims to unsettle dying and surviving discourses and pose ‘troubling’ questions for geographers around methodologies, politics and emotions of such research. She argues that by employing a creative cathartic methodology, it leans towards an understanding of what it means to be taught by the experience of (traumatized) others. Madge strongly advocates for a politicized compassion for care towards those living through, on and with life-threatening illness within and beyond the academy. Through sharing her experience, she questions whether this means anything for how we listen, learn and respond to ‘our’ living now? Do her experiences provoke responses to everyday practices and compassionate outlooks, and if not, why not? This paper and the questions Madge raises may lead readers to question their own mortality and challenge their own ‘emotional veneer’. She urges acceptance of abject and difficult bodies within academic spaces by adopting an understanding of relational mortality. Madge is aware that this will not be easy to achieve due to the wider political forces that exist within the academy. ‘Everyday acts of kindness’ will come at a price as the outcomes are not auditable or countable Madge suggests, but in the longer term, it may contribute towards making the space of the academy more inclusive, compassionate, and emotionally and corporeally healthy.

Abi McNiven’s paper 2016 also directly discusses embodied emotions, but this time in relation to pregnancy loss. Like Stevenson’s suggestion that despite its prevalence in society, attempted suicide is neglected in geographies of death and dying, McNiven focuses on the ways in which highly occurring human losses are discounted as deaths. Bringing together insights from a feminist reproductive politics and geographies of dying and death, she considers how narrow definitions of death have significant implications for the recognition, and lack of, women’s lived experiences of pregnancy loss. Currently defined by medical, legal, biological and moral discourses, which are often evoked by the pro- and anti-abortion lobbies that set to define when and where life begins and ends and ultimately what counts as death. Acknowledging that the vocabulary of death and dying requires careful navigation in the context of reproductive rights, McNiven suggests making space for an expanded account of women’s reproductive experiences beyond terminations helps to open up what can be considered to constitute ‘death’, and loss and the sites where death occurs. Drawing on her research which entailed exploratory interviews with persons who self-selected as experiencing pregnancy loss, she found normative boundaries were exceeded as interviewees narrated their haptic, sonic, visual, material, emotional-affective experiences of ultrasonography and related spaces. In the UK, pregnant women are offered at least two scans during their pregnancy at 8–14 weeks, and between 18 and 21 weeks. Scans are represented as completely painless and risk-free, having no known side effects on mothers or babies and ultrasonography is often perceived as a highlight of pregnancy, bringing mothers (and others) visibly closer to a/their baby. To highlight the missed complexity informed by cultural joyful connotations, McNiven draws on feminist emotional geographies to conclude that what is needed is a rubric concept of pregnancy loss. This concept according to McNiven should be based on a recognition of physical/bodily, emotional and material (biological) aspects, whereby the experiences of pregnancy loss are the basis of personhood rather than a route to in/visibility.

Culture plays a critical role in how people perceive and respond to death/s, dying/s and bereavement/s. Alistair Hunter’s paper (2016) provides theoretical insights for deathscapes through a consideration of how mortuary practices – as inherently spatial phenomenon – pose a critical juncture in the settlement of diasporic communities. Hunter starts his paper by showing that the sedentarist bias in the deathscapes literature has led to migrants’ place-making, through funerary and memorial practices, to be overlooked. Drawing on insights from Hage (1996), Hunter argues how concepts of power, home and nation give purchase to the question ‘what do spatial contestations around migrant deathscapes reveal about the process of negotiating “home” in the diaspora?’ Through the use of two cases; disputes around open-air Hindu funeral pyres in Britain and planning permission for a Muslim cemetery in south Glasgow, Scotland, Hunter reveals that deathscapes are paradigmatic sites through which to study the power dynamics in geographies of death and in particular contested place-making. Hunter identifies how migrant communities may repatriate their dead, but death also leads to the creation of deep and permanent foundations for settlement and belonging with migrant and subsequent generations adopting burial and funerary practices from the homeland. Drawing on media sources, interviews with key stakeholders, legal papers and planning documents, Hunter reveals how negotiation and contestation around migrant community funeral rites, as they are inscribed on the landscape, not only shift migrant communities into the public sphere, but also result in tailoring of diasporic communities demands in response to legal, political and community concerns. Bringing diaspora into deathscapes offers a way to show the diasporic deathscapes are something that involves everyone.

Christine Dunn, Ann Le Mare and Christina Makungu situate their paper (2016) in a Global South context, contributing to a growing recognition of the varied cultural perceptions and practices around funerals. Alongside Madge and McNiven, this paper provides a route for broadening medical geographies engagements with dying and death. Dunn et al. uncover the contradictions of the actual or anticipated use of a health intervention (a bednet) in a ‘traditional’ funeral and mourning period, deemed as a sacred time-space in rural Tanzania. Their paper identifies a divergence from ‘expected’ and everyday socio-cultural practices and health-related behaviours because during funerals in rural Tanzania, a mosquito bednet is out of place because of its associations with comfort and wealth and thus showing an unsympathetic relationship to the dead. The juxtaposition between the bednet as a bio-medical intervention and the space of the funeral as a place to eschew personal comfort and reinforce group social cohesion is argued, illustrating how in particular places and at particular times what might be regarded as good health practice is deemed secondary to showing respect for the dead (as was also the case during the recent Ebola outbreak discussed above). Dunn et al. suggest that this can most helpfully be understood through the frame of ‘liminality’, based on complex neogiation of risk behaviours, rather than through a signular bio-medical approach which aims to ‘control’ disease transmission. Within the setting of a funeral, then, culturally embedded behaviours take precedence over personal health protection. More broadly, Dunn et al. conclude by suggesting opportunities for intra-disciplinary engagement between social, cultural, health and development geographers around dying and death and that there is a need to take a multi-scalar and bio-political approach to public health interventions if they are to reduce morbidity and mortality.

Future agendas: enlivening and politicizing geographies of dying/s, death/s and mourning

The papers in this special section contribute to, but also broaden the scope of what might be regarded as Anglo-American-influenced deathscapes research, focused on the literal and representational spaces of the end of life, sites of bodily remains and memorialization. We have demonstrated deathscapes should encompass closeness to death and its multiple messy emotional politics to fully recognize the continuum of living/s-dying/s. Our explicit focus on the geographies of dying/s, death/s, survival/s, and living/s with loss highlights that an expanded understanding is needed of the social, cultural and practical moorings of dying/s and death/s in the Global South. At the same time, further work is required to understand the intimate experiences and practices relating to death/s and dying/s across the world. Especially, how these intersect at meeting points of ‘North’ and ‘South’ through the mobilities of diseases, migrants and refugees. Geographers are well placed to proactively intervene and contribute not only to contemporary debates on disease spread and public health intervention strategies, but also to encompass how death/s, dying/s and survival/s take place within communities and cultures, and the spaces where humans and epidemics meet (see Brown, 2006; Greenhough, 2012). Likewise, we need to understand the ways through which death/s, dying/s and remembrance/s are increasingly being mediated through online spaces, which are fluid, mobile and transcend borders. However, such progress is compromised due to a globally narrow engagement with dying/s, death/s and mourning/s, which is further limited by an inadequate vocabulary regardless of cultural context. It is only when faced with the certainty of death that issues are discussed in a time-constrained way rather than being part of an ongoing conversation throughout life. Social and cultural geographies offer lenses through which the spatialities of dying/s and death/s can be explored and debated beyond just the morbid, and traumatic and re-engage with a politics of hope even in intractable situations.

From Syrian refugees and other migrants dying whilst crossing the seas to Europe, to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and its movements to the US and Europe, to young adults in the UK dying from cancer and publically charting their end of life journeys, we have demonstrated, dying/s, death/s and survival/s in the contemporary world are contextually bound within a wider P/politics. Often obscured by marginalization and discrimination and yet ubiquitous, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how who we are and where we live can e/affect end of life experiences. It is also for us to ask how, why, where, when and from what we die (see Tyner, 2014) and the multiple interconnections through which society, culture and politics are implicated in practices around life and death decisions. Geographers with an enthusiasm for this specific and related fields can make contributions through actively engaging with a host of topics; for example, the environmental agenda; national and local government policy and planning; transport; migration; landscape; health and well-being; the varied complex and dynamic embodied and emotional-affective experiences of dying/s, death/s and survival/s; and explore in-depth the intersections of socio-economic class, gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and similar factors. One question is to ask, why has so much research occurred without reference to these multiple intersections, whilst so little has taken place on the basis of research that calls for their inclusion? Alongside end of life experiences, there is considerable scope to incorporate the voices of those who have survived a close-to-death experience and explore the specific circumstances and the post-living/s on, with and through (see Madge, 2016; Stevenson, 2016). The ways through which living has been naturalized needs to be problematized, whilst thinking about how ‘taking life’ ‘rights to die’ and ‘planning for death’ has been ‘othered’. With a relative shift on a global scale to increased longevity, we are provided with an opportunity to think contextually, through and with how a person may want to die, and whether death can be facilitated to meet the needs and multiple social, political, emotional and cultural expectations of individuals, families, communities and societies. This research might not be easy to conduct and inevitably will raise methodological, personal and practical challenges in how to represent the varied time-spaces of life, death and all the in-betweens. Finally, we urge geographers to not only develop theoretical insights in the relationships under investigation, but to work across global and disciplinary boundaries to develop compassionate geographies of dying/s, death/s and living/s, not only in scholarship, but as part of everyday practices and politics. This collection of papers, we hope is very much the catalyst for an enlivened body of work that will contribute to an expanding corpus.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

The papers in this special section originate from conference sessions entitled ‘And now, the end is near: geographies of dying and death’ convened by Charlotte Kenten, Olivia Stevenson and Sarah Deedat for the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual International Conference at the University of Edinburgh (see http://conference.rgs.org/AC2012/250). We thank the RGS-IBG Geography of Health Research Group for sponsoring these sessions, the presenters and audience and Avril Maddrell as discussant. We also thank Mary Gilmartin and Elaine Burroughs for their editorial support with this special section.