Vision and Values
Organizational Goals
Academic Development
As scholars, we endeavor to create and share the resources needed to foster ethical academics and scholarship. We implore academics of death and dying to develop scholarship that serves the dignity of both life and death and furthers this field of study.
Professional Development
Death Scholars, Inc. (The End-of-Life and Death Scholars organization) fosters professional development by offering engaged nonprofit leadership opportunities where members actively contribute to organizational growth through roles in event planning, human resources, and DEI initiatives.
Collaborative research projects allow scholars to co-create knowledge, share interdisciplinary insights, and produce meaningful contributions to the field of death and bereavement studies. Shared resources, including workshops, publications, and networking events, support members in expanding their academic and professional skills. Our warm, inclusive, and scholarly environment encourages mentorship and collective learning, creating a space where scholars at all levels feel supported in their academic journeys.
Likewise, end-of-life care and the funeral industry must be stewarded by culturally informed and compassionate professionals who want the best for their patrons, living and dead. We encourage excellence and empathy within this industry by providing industry leaders with socially informed and peer-reviewed research as a result of our collaborative research.
Community Development
Mentorship is central to the development of our community and requires that our organization ushers in new generations of EOL, death, and dying scholars. We are committed to providing resources for early career scholars to thrive in an increasingly more competitive academic environment. We prioritize collaboration for the furthering of our collective scholarship. We welcome questions, relationship-building working groups, and new ways to imagine our relationships with death subjects.
Recognition
This website will continue to recognize and serve the community that researches, organizes, and publishes in the areas of end-of-life, death, grief/bereavement, and post-mortem research. Recognition includes keeping clear and updated records of those who have served in leadership, research, and special projects.
Our Future
Increasing Interdisciplinarity in Death & Dying Studies
Interdisciplinarity is one of the central strengths and foundations of our organization. We will continue to promote and increase interdisciplinary perspectives on death, dying, and end-of-life work.
Promoting Healthy Death Awareness
Death positivity is a recent trend in Western death culture. While death positivity promotes death awareness, it also foments an attitude of toxic positivity. Thoughts and feelings around death are often negative, avoidant, and confused, and those feelings need to be validated in order to be understood and processed. We will promote an attitude of death awareness that encourages individuals and collectives to wrestle with the whole array of emotions and affective experiences surrounding death and dying.
Advocating for Human Rights in Life and Death
Inequity in life is perpetuated in death as well. We see the struggle for human rights and bodily autonomy as a struggle that goes hand in hand with issues of death and dying. We pledge to pursue scholarship that centers human rights, especially the right to choose what happens to your body in life, in death, and post-mortem.
A Global Perspective
Too often, academic scholarship organizations that begin in the United States center U.S.-specific scholarship. Death is not a homogenous experience, therefore we will continue our commitment to include international scholars in our citational practices, future research collaborations, outreach, and within our working groups.
Our Beliefs
These beliefs are by no means extensive or final, rather, they are meant to communicate some of the central tenets we keep in mind when pursuing research, projects, and communicating about our work.
We all die, but not equally.
While we all die, we don’t all die in the same way. Inequity and injustice are just as prevalent in death and dying as they are in life. Our work as scholars must address the particularities of death and dying in order to accurately and equitably represent the experience. We believe in opening doors and pathways for inclusive conversations about death and dying.
Death and dying work should serve the communities that it addresses.
We strive to engage with death and dying not just on a theoretical level but also on a practical and applied level. Taking a human-first approach to death and dying means producing work that intervenes on organizational and systemic levels and is accessible to the public.
A "human-first approach" to death and dying focuses on addressing not just individual experiences, but also the broader organizational and systemic structures that influence how death and bereavement are handled. Producing work at organizational and systemic levels means creating policies, research, and practices that can reform institutions—like hospitals, funeral homes, or universities—to ensure that these entities better support people during end-of-life processes. For instance, it may involve revising workplace bereavement policies to be more inclusive or advocating for healthcare systems to provide more compassionate care.
Making this work accessible to the public means that the research or policies should be easy to understand and applicable in real-world settings. Instead of being confined to academic discussions, this approach ensures that the insights can be used by individuals, families, or organizations directly affected by death and dying. It serves communities by providing practical solutions to improve their experiences with loss, grief, and memorialization, making the process more humane, equitable, and supportive of diverse needs.
Death and dying work should be fundamentally anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, decolonial, and queer-friendly.
We align ourselves with The Collective for Radical Death Studies in believing (and practicing) that there is no place for discrimination in death and dying research. Likewise, we take a radically inclusive stance on death and dying issues. It is our goal as scholars of death and dying to produce work that constantly critiques hegemonic structures of power and oppression when we encounter them.
This includes compassionately holding our colleagues accountable and creating an atmosphere for growth and betterment in our own community.
Death and dying work require an attitude of humility, compassion, and curiosity.
As scholars of death and dying, we often engage with topics that are sensitive and emotionally complex. This work requires that we remain humble in order to accept feedback and criticism on our projects, engage compassionately so that we ensure our colleagues and communities feel seen, heard, represented, and respected, and stay curious to always ensure that our work is engaging new trends and issues as they emerge.