Erica Borgstrom: Narratives of Death, Grief and Loss During Covid-19

About the talk:
The COVID-19 pandemic brought death and grief to the forefront of the news and people’s daily experiences, often highlighting the isolated and individualised experiences of grief due to lockdowns and impacted funerary practices. As scholars interested in death studies, Dr Erica Borgstrom and Dr Sharon Mallon were aware of the shifting experiences and expectations that people had throughout the pandemic. This Open University (OU) funded project, set out to capture the diverse, lived experience of OU students, alumni and staff during the pandemic in relation to the themes of death, dying, bereavement, grief and loss. In this presentation, Dr Borgstrom will discuss the series of essays and reflections that have been chosen for inclusion in this collection. The presentation will reflect on how the publishing process has captured individual and collective experiences of death and loss that have occurred during the pandemic and to consider how it impacted the ways in which we make sense of dying and bereavement.
About the speaker:
Dr Erica Borgstrom is a Senior Lecturer at The Open University. She specialises in researching end-of-life care from anthropological and sociological perspectives and has won international awards for her research and public engagement. Since 2020, she is the lead for Open Thanatology, an interdisciplinary research group that promotes the study and education of death, dying, loss and grief across the life course. Erica is editor of Mortality - an international, interdisciplinary journal of death studies - and a council member for the Association for the Study of Death and Society.