Join us for an engaging 90 minute panel to discuss which deaths count and why. Hear from speakers from India, the UK and the US to learn about how death is accounted for, documented, politicised and contested. Our speakers will each have 15-20 minutes to share their work, before we open the panel to a wider discussion between the panellists and panel attendees.

Panellist papers:

Voicing Loss: The search for justice and accountability in coronial death investigations

Jessica Jacobson (ICPR, Birkbeck University of London, UK) and Lorna Templeton (CDAS, University of Bath, UK)

Voicing Loss is the largest research study of bereaved peoples’ experiences of coronial death investigations conducted to date in England and Wales. We interviewed 89 bereaved respondents, 82 professionals and 19 witnesses in order to explore what is – according to law and policy, and as experienced in practice – and what could and should be their role in the process. Most of the bereaved people we talked with believed that failings by state bodies – such as health and social care services, or the police or prisons – had caused or contributed to the death. Their overriding hope for the inquest was that such failings would be identified and acknowledged, and the resultant learning would help to prevent future deaths. More broadly, they envisaged this as part of a process of achieving justice for the deceased and accountability for the death. The reality, however, was that these hopes and expectations were frequently disappointed. This was variously attributed to defensiveness on the part of public services; coroners setting the scope of their investigations too narrowly; and weak content and negligible impacts of coroners’ Prevention of Future Deaths reports. It is apparent, furthermore, that the very concepts of ‘justice’ and ‘accountability’ are ambiguous and contested in the context of the coroner service. Our presentation will share findings from Voicing Loss to prompt further discussion.

A systematic assessment of public burial records in the United States

Jennifer Brite (York College, United States)

In the United States, despite their long history, public burials have rarely been studied in the epidemiologic or social science literature. Although several jurisdictions publicly release information about public burials, no government-sponsored clearinghouse exists nationwide for these types of data. Through a combination of advanced web-scraping and traditional outreach methods, we developed a database to understand these types of interments. Specifically, we examined whether they are increasing over time and whether public burial rates vary by demographic and area-level markers of poverty and social isolation. This is the first systematic examination of public burial at the national level and offers a novel way to understand marginalized populations. Accounting for approximately 1 of every 100 deaths in recent history, this work is key to understanding at-risk populations that are often difficult to document in traditional health and demographic surveys.

Becoming Community: Death and the Possibilities of Life

Devika Bordia (Shiv Nadar University Delhi, India)

This paper examines the concept of community among Bhil and Girassia ‘tribals’ in Western India where death, killing, and parricide have been historically pervasive. The anthropologist Robert Hertz describes the various steps in mortuary rituals and how these rituals serve the purpose of a collectivity remaining intact in the context of death. While the coherence of the social is central to Hertz’s work, cultural studies scholar Achille Mbembe points to the power dynamics inherent in the very formation of the social that dictates who can live and who must die. Building on but also departing from both these frameworks, this paper shows how community is always in the process of being made as tribals visibilize death, including their complicity in killing, but rather than apportioning blame they take collective responsibility for death particularly through acts of witnessing and signification.

Panellist biographies

Devika Bordia is Associate Professor at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi. She has published in journals such as Contributions to Indian Sociology, Diogenes, and Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis. She is the co-editor of the book Regimes of Legality: Ethnography of Criminal Cases in South Asia. Currently she is working on a book manuscript titled Becoming Community: Primitivity, Death, and the Possibilities of Life. She received her PhD from Yale University and has held postdoctoral fellowships with CNRS, Paris and the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Gottingen.

Jennifer Brite is an epidemiologist and specializes in health disparities. She holds a master's in public health from Columbia University and a doctor of public health degree from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. She has applied public health experience through her roles in the infection control department at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the New York City Department of Health, where she researched health outcomes related to September 11 exposures. She is currently an assistant professor of public health at York College.

Jessica Jacobsen is Professor of Criminal Justice and Director of the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR) at Birkbeck, University of London. As ICPR’s Director, Jessica oversees the institute’s wide-ranging programme of academically-grounded, policy-oriented research on many aspects of the justice system. Jessica is Principal Investigator on the Voicing Loss project.

Lorna Templeton has worked in research over 25 years (with the NHS, for academic institutions and as a freelance consultant), with national and international work covering the impact of substance use and gambling behaviours on children and families, bereavement through substance use, end of life and substance use, and as a researcher on the Voicing Loss team.

Who’s death counts? Social (in)justice and public health in death and dying