scholarly journals Death, A Notion

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Holly Loft

<p>Contemporary Western society has all but abolished the need for a formal grieving process with death becoming an avoided, feared, and shameful topic. In a brutal revolution from the omnipresent death of the past, death is now unfamiliar and displaced. An all-consuming society rushing to beat mortality by finding new ways to extend one’s lifespan, becoming increasingly secularised and refusing to permit the ugliness of death within the collective happiness of today’s society. This results in places for remembrance and acceptance becoming scarce, with silence and stillness becoming confused and conflicted with the noise of cars and footsteps. Therefore the void between life and death grows larger, increasing in depth and stature as awareness fades.  This thesis raises the question of interior design and architecture as a key participant in the discussion of death in contemporary western society. The fractured relationship between death, bereavement and society is analysed in order to establish how societal attitudes and the perception of death has shifted. More precisely the research explores the specificity of an interior spatial design needed to assist the grieving process associated with the loss of a loved one, both at an individual level, and as a collective experience thereby seeking to create a plane of resonance between the land of the living and the obverse, the land of the dead.</p>

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Holly Loft

<p>Contemporary Western society has all but abolished the need for a formal grieving process with death becoming an avoided, feared, and shameful topic. In a brutal revolution from the omnipresent death of the past, death is now unfamiliar and displaced. An all-consuming society rushing to beat mortality by finding new ways to extend one’s lifespan, becoming increasingly secularised and refusing to permit the ugliness of death within the collective happiness of today’s society. This results in places for remembrance and acceptance becoming scarce, with silence and stillness becoming confused and conflicted with the noise of cars and footsteps. Therefore the void between life and death grows larger, increasing in depth and stature as awareness fades.  This thesis raises the question of interior design and architecture as a key participant in the discussion of death in contemporary western society. The fractured relationship between death, bereavement and society is analysed in order to establish how societal attitudes and the perception of death has shifted. More precisely the research explores the specificity of an interior spatial design needed to assist the grieving process associated with the loss of a loved one, both at an individual level, and as a collective experience thereby seeking to create a plane of resonance between the land of the living and the obverse, the land of the dead.</p>


Crisis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Shannon Lange ◽  
Courtney Bagge ◽  
Charlotte Probst ◽  
Jürgen Rehm

Abstract. Background: In recent years, the rate of death by suicide has been increasing disproportionately among females and young adults in the United States. Presumably this trend has been mirrored by the proportion of individuals with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. Aim: We aimed to investigate whether the proportion of individuals in the United States with suicidal ideation who attempted suicide differed by age and/or sex, and whether this proportion has increased over time. Method: Individual-level data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 2008–2017, were used to estimate the year-, age category-, and sex-specific proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide. We then determined whether this proportion differed by age category, sex, and across years using random-effects meta-regression. Overall, age category- and sex-specific proportions across survey years were estimated using random-effects meta-analyses. Results: Although the proportion was found to be significantly higher among females and those aged 18–25 years, it had not significantly increased over the past 10 years. Limitations: Data were self-reported and restricted to past-year suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. Conclusion: The increase in the death by suicide rate in the United States over the past 10 years was not mirrored by the proportion of individuals with past-year suicidal ideation who attempted suicide during this period.


2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 901-910
Author(s):  
Robert E. Goodin ◽  
James Mahmud Rice

Judging from Gallup Polls in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, opinion often changes during an election campaign. Come election day itself, however, opinion often reverts back nearer to where it was before the campaign began. That that happens even in Australia, where voting is compulsory and turnout is near-universal, suggests that differential turnout among those who have and have not been influenced by the campaign is not the whole story. Inspection of individual-level panel data from 1987 and 2005 British General Elections confirms that between 3 and 5 percent of voters switch voting intentions during the campaign, only to switch back toward their original intentions on election day. One explanation, we suggest, is that people become more responsible when stepping into the poll booth: when voting they reflect back on the government's whole time in office, rather than just responding (as when talking to pollsters) to the noise of the past few days' campaigning. Inspection of Gallup Polls for UK snap elections suggests that this effect is even stronger in elections that were in that sense unanticipated.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-78
Author(s):  

Paediatricians responsible for neonatal care have been increasingly involved in, and aware of, the importance of parent infant interactions. These interactions are of major importance when concerned with the dying newborn. Over the past few years parental involvement in decision making related to life and death of newborn babies is becoming increasingly accepted ... more and more parents are opting to take their baby home to die. As changing patterns of birthing increasingly involve fathers and children, so death is once again becoming a family affair.


Labyrinth ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-105
Author(s):  
Gianluca Chiadini

The reception of the notions of trace, arkhé, and document in the work of Alain Nadaud This paper intends to point out the philosophical features in the novels of the French writer Alain Nadaud and their links with the philosophical theory concerning the concepts of trace, arkhé and document elaborated by Jacques Derrida in the second half of the XX century. This subject, related to the contemporary socio-historical concept of post-truth, reveals the originality and the up-to-date tendency in the novels of Alain Nadaud. This paper uncovers new important aspects of his work by proposing a solid philosophical interpretation of its main theoretical principles. In particular, it uncovers the philosophical reasons at the origin of his writing, which is based on the historical research method. Furthermore, it reveals the sense of dystopia of his novels and relates it with the most recent socio-philosophical analysis of contemporary western society.


Author(s):  
Lan Wei

Abstract Over the past two decades, Chinese rural architecture has experienced dramatic changes through the Building the Chinese Socialist New Village movement. Thousands of new houses, particularly in the model of the New Village, have risen abruptly out of the ground. These Western-style new houses with a garden (huayuan yangfang), which often appear in the media as typical family houses in Western society, largely represent the image of the good life of the state and the peasant in contemporary China. In this article, I focus on how the family house is produced and consumed in Baikou New Village in south China. By presenting the materiality of the dwelling space, this paper probes the intertwined processes of the materialisation of the blueprint of the good life and how the new houses influence family life (especially intergenerational relationships) in post-socialist Baikou New Village.


2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 302-321
Author(s):  
Marion Bowman

This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlooked: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is – or has been – lived can be achieved.


1988 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana C. Hughes ◽  
Dan G. Blazer ◽  
Linda K. George

Effects of age on the distribution of specific life events experienced during the past year by community-based adults were examined controlling for sex, race, education, marital status, and place of residence. The controlled analyses were done using logistic regression. Data were gathered via personal interview from 3,798 respondents ages eighteen years and over who participated in the Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA), community survey from North Carolina. Respondents were placed in one of four age groups. The percentage of respondents reporting each of the nineteen events examined ranged from 0.5 percent for death of spouse to 19.1 percent for death of loved one. Age was an important predictor in the controlled analysis for thirteen of the seventeen life events examined. A majority of differences occurred between the youngest and oldest age groups. Age differences were not found for illness of one week or more involving activity limitation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Blanchette

This review surveys the past 30 years of the anthropology of corporate animal agribusiness, analyzing how various themes embedded in the words of the article's title—industrial, meat, and production—have been taken up by ethnographers of confinement farms and mechanized slaughterhouses. In so doing, it describes how the literature finds the animal life-and-death cycle underlying modern meat to be a hybrid and uneven mixture of industrialisms both old and emerging, at once violent and caring, far-reaching yet incomplete. The review further examines the numerous and distinct ways that scholars have suggested that industrial meat production is an exceptional kind of industrialism: one that requires analytics, ethics, forms of critique, and modes of attention that differ from those developed by studies of other sites of manufacturing.


2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Brown ◽  
Dawn Penney

This article draws on material associated with a solo sailing circumnavigation, undertaken by 16 year old Jessica Watson in 2009–2010, to discuss how her voyage provided a focal point for debates relating to voluntary risk-taking conducted within the sport and leisure context. Specifically, we illustrate how public and media commentaries on her voyage reflect discourses of risk being infused and conflated with discourses of responsibility, youth and gender. Our analysis brings to the fore the contested, moral and political nature of risk discourses in contemporary western society. Public reaction to Watson’s voyage indicates that descriptions of western society as risk-averse fail to capture the situated and dynamic perceptions of risk.


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