You can watch a recording of Prof Borgstrom's inaugural lecture on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f37EU4HZxsk

Abstract

Professor Erica Borgstrom’s lecture will focus on lessons learned from 15 years of doing research in dying, death and loss and the possibilities for re-imagining how the end of life managed and death and grief are responded to.

Death is universal and affects everyone, but experiences of death, how one lives at the end of life, and what people learn from loss are greatly shaped by social and cultural factors. In this inaugural lecture Professor Borgstrom will share ‘lessons learned’ from her research, interwoven with stories of ‘love and loss’ from her personal life that has shaped and been shaped by her research. In doing so, her lecture invites the audience to consider with her what the opportunities and consequences can be of imagining, managing and responding to death and bereavement in different ways.

The lecture will cover three areas of her work: palliative and end of life care, Covid-19 and grief, and what it is like being a ‘death researcher’. A common thread in her work is to consider what is ‘taken for granted’ and to look for unintended consequences. She examines these through the juxtaposition of policy and guidance, practice, and people’s lived experience – thinking through the combinations of what should happen, what is done or not, and how people make sense of it. She argues that by doing so, we can re-imagine other possibilities and foreground the importance of relations and interconnectedness. Engaging with re-imaging is timely as the UK, and other countries, wrestle with how to improve society, care and death. Especially in the context of increased care needs at population level, debates about medical decision-making and assisted dying, and the ongoing individual and societal aftermath related to death and grief from the Covid-19 pandemic. By bringing her personal life and experiences in, Professor Borgstrom illuminates how such re-imaginings are not just about policy and health and social practice, but also how research can be done and how to live one’s life.