Posts by Jennie Riley

While the Care in Funerals project formally wound down a little while ago, its rich dataset still holds plenty of potential for further analysis, thinking and writing.

Jennie Riley, Vikki Entwistle and Arnar Arnason took the 2023 meeting of the Centre for Death and Society annual conference as an opportunity…

On 9th September 2022, Jennifer Riley's pre-recorded presentation was shown at the fourth ‘Death and Culture’ conference, this year hosted at York St John University.

Our paper was entitled Conceptualising Care for the Corpse: the pandemic as a lens for examining values and practices related to care for the deceased…

On 9th and 10th June 2022, several members of the Care in Funerals research team had the pleasure of attending the annual conference of the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society (CDAS), hosted online. The theme this year was ‘Institutions and Death’.

In addition to an interactive session…

The Care in Funerals project is investigating what can be learned from disruptions to UK funeral provision during the COVID-19 pandemic, and from how people adapted to those disruptions. In this blog post, Jennie Riley and Vikki Entwistle focus on practices involving the dead body.

Dead human bodies have multiple…

Jennie Riley compares the seemingly incongruous rites of passage of marriage and death, and considers similarities between the two which the pandemic has brought into sharper relief. 

Weddings and funerals hold very different places in our cultural imaginations. Their juxtaposition is part of what makes the 1994 film title so…

Some highlights from team members attending the DDD15 conference 

The 15th international conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal (DDD15) was held online from 1st – 4th September 2021, hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University for the Association for the Study of Death and Society. This year’s theme…

Jennie Riley explores a range of experiences of – and opinions towards – funeral livestreaming, and considers some of the questions this burgeoning phenomenon might require us to ask.

At the start of June 2021, it was my pleasure to attend my good friend Katharine’s wedding to husband Sam…

Jennie Riley reflects on the differences and similarities between the Spanish Flu and Coronavirus. While both pandemics saw significant restrictions on everyday life, and on death, it is harder to compare the ways in which people experienced grief – particularly when family losses are set against a broader backdrop of…

We asked a few members of the team to share ‘something that struck you’ about what they saw in the media of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. 

Jennie Riley – Choice and Personalisation

I didn’t commit to the full two and a half hours of BBC coverage which preceded the…

Jennie Riley considers choice and variety in British funerals – two important themes which would have been much less familiar even a few decades ago.

We have come quite far from the popularised, potent funeral tableau, with families dressed in black, wearing correspondingly sombre demeanours, gathered in a church or…