Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
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This brief afterword summarizes the scope and potential of institutions and institutionalization in relation to death, dying and bereavement, making a call for the field of death studies to remain inclusive through interdisciplinary and global dialogue.
This chapter examines how the schoolchildren of Christ’s Hospital participated in funerals on the streets of 18th-century London. The children attended the funerals of benefactors whose financial contributions supported their education and their presence was organized by the school. Participation served the needs of both the institution and the benefactor because it placed the schoolchildren at the heart of the well-spectated funeral procession and presented them to the people of the city. For Christ’s Hospital, the children were a visual reminder of the work that it did and a prescribed reading of its success in creating future members of the City guided by discipline and morality. For the benefactors, the children were evidence of philanthropic activity which had occurred in life and at death. The institution had been supported by their money, often guided by their governance and in the funeral this relationship was communicated to the friends and neighbours of the deceased.
With the rapid expansion of palliative care across China, it is imperative to establish standardized criteria that harmonize with its swiftly evolving sociocultural landscape. This is of paramount importance for assessing the Quality of Death (QoD) and further enhancing support for the end-of-life experience. Conceptualizing culture as an institution, this chapter aims to lay the foundation for a nuanced understanding of QoD in contemporary China. It explores how the dying experience and associated needs are negotiated by all involved parties, drawing on existing research and policy dialogues. The chapter sheds lights on the interplay between traditional collectivism and emerging individualism, shaping the perception, experience and institutionalization of a ‘good death’ in China. Embracing a need-based approach, it sets overarching principles for QoD assessments’ future development, fostering a culturally attuned approach in this rapidly evolving society. The core of QoD evaluation in China is acknowledging cultural influences on diverse dying process needs. It underscores the pivotal importance of relational autonomy, treating dying care as a collaborative endeavour rooted in mutual support and understanding.
Institutions play a crucial role in shaping experiences of end-of-life care, dying, death, body disposal and bereavement. However, there has been little holistic or multidisciplinary research in this area, with studies typically focusing on individual settings such as hospitals and cemeteries, or being confined to specific disciplines.
This interdisciplinary collection combines chapters on process, place and the past to examine the relationships both within and between institutions, institutionalisation and death in international contexts.
Of broad appeal to students and academics in areas including social policy, health sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, cultural studies, history and the wider humanities, this collection spans multiple disciplines to offer crucial insights into the end of life, body disposal, bereavement, and mourning.
This chapter explores the evolution of Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery as a municipal institution that embodies the amalgamation of religious and nation-state identity in post-revolutionary Iran. Initially a regular burial place, over time the cemetery has transitioned into a form of municipality managed by a mayor. State intervention, by the appointment of a mayor and control over the cemetery space, has signified the government’s attempt to affirm dominance and make a unified ideological narrative. This amalgamation of religious and national identity is still visible in the propagation of symbols of religious nationalism and the suppression of cultural diversity within the cemetery’s strict rules today. Through meticulous urban planning and spatial organization, the cemetery emerges as a microcosm of political power dynamics and ideological rhetoric, representative of the government’s efforts to control society in post-revolutionary Iran.
In recent years, late modern societies have witnessed a profound change in grief management. One important feature in this development is a shift to more individually centred, experience-based grief management carried out by individuals in diverse digital platforms. This chapter aims to look grief management as a profoundly digitalized practice carried out by Instagram deathstyle gurus and adapted to the institutional logic of commercial social media and its attention economy. The chapter argues that this transformation constitutes a new institutional logic of mourning characterized by the commodification of grief and mourners in digital society.
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the simultaneous emergence of both intellectual institutions and garden cemeteries in Georgian and Victorian Britain. As two heterotopias, the chapter explores their relationship and how the two spaces are inversions of each other, with the cemetery becoming the ‘inside out’ of the museum as a type of outdoor museum that collected and documented the lives of the dead. The chapter explores how the Victorian fever and excitement for collecting (in many forms), gathering and analysing data from increasing populations in provincial cities were utilized as a justification for a new space for the dead on a grand scale, thereby recreating scenes from antiquity with newfound knowledge among a powerful new middle-class civic elite through their new and developing institutions from learned societies. This civic elite is often faceless in scholarship, and in response this chapter brings certain significant individuals to the fore to show that their roles and networks of influence were just as important in contributing to the formation of these new garden cemeteries as that of renowned cemetery designer John Claudius Loudon.
This chapter challenges readers to reflect on their thinking about prison as a place of death, dying and loss. What is considered a death in custody differs around the globe and therefore it is unclear how many people die in prison each year. This chapter aims to highlight the humanity of those dying in this institutional setting and to show how prisons are challenging environments with complicated bureaucratic rules and power dynamics. These rules and dynamics are not always consistent with the needs of dying prisoners and can result in what is called ‘institutional thoughtlessness’. What is more, dying people in prison also challenge assumptions about whose life is deemed ‘grieveable’ and who is deserving of care and access to a so-called ‘good death’. Prison as an institution shapes the way people think and feel about death and dying in these environments, and with a growing and ageing prison population globally, these issues around life and death deserve our attention.
This short chapter introduces the reader to the topic of institutions and processes of institutionalization, and the origins of the collection from the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society 2022 Annual Conference.
This chapter provides an overview of the ‘legal’ market for human body parts in its institutional context. This includes tracing the sources and uses of body parts as well as the relationships that exist between various market participants. While the World Health Organization in 2003 identified the business of body parts, especially tissue transplantation, as an issue of global concern, the global body parts market has proliferated and remains largely unregulated.
The market for body parts relies on charitable whole-body donations. These donations are negotiated by intermediaries, such as body brokers and biological tissue banks. The intermediaries are structured as both for-profit, as well as not-for-profit entities, and operate in a complex socioeconomic environment obscured by inchoate regulation as well as a mixture of anonymity, grief, life and death decisions, and medical miracles. This chapter identifies the institutional relationships that exist between several key market participants that service a variety of end users, including a network of intermediaries and body donors. The chapter concludes with the identification of sites for financial value creation and a consideration of the accountabilities that arise.
