We are keen to learn and share ideas and insights through creative collaborations and knowledge-sharing connections.
Please get in touch if you have an idea or would like to have a conversation.
* On 18th November Dr Laura Davies joined anthropologist Dr Sally Raudon as speakers in the ‘Death and Dying’ Series for the Jesus College Intellectual Forum. The series covered many topics including end of life care and ideas of a good death, questions about immortality in a digital age and the questions around potential legal changes in relation to assisted dying. Their panel explored historical and contemporary ideas, and fears, around death and burial.
You can see a video of this talk, and others in the series on here:
Tourists visiting Westminster Abbey in the mid 18th Century. The tombs and memorials were of great interest to visitors.
* In 2024 we have been exploring how games and gaming (tabletop games and video games) might be turned to as a tool to facilitate conversations about death, dying and bereavement that are more open, confident and helpful, whether in the context of therapeutic settings, end of life care planning, or for individuals and their close and loved ones to embark on at any time.
We ran a series of workshops bringing together end of life care and bereavement support specialists with games designers, which generated so many ideas and thoughts about potential developments in this area.
You can download (free) a resource explaining what these conversations sounded like, what we learned, the wonderful artwork that was made, and some easy to follow guidance for you if you’d like to explore for yourself, your practice, your family or your community what these kind of conversations might be like.
We would love to hear from you if you experiment with these resources or if you have insights you’d like to share in relation to them. Email us at good-death@english.cam.ac.uk or X: @what_death
* We were also thrilled to join the Collaborative Futures Academy in September 2024 to present a case study conversation and a workshop on ‘Cultures of Care’, exploring how we build settings in which emotions can be safely held, shared and addressed within research and engagement work.
A toolkit based on the expertise, insights and practical guidance shared during the Academy is free to download:
https://doi.org/10.7479/m1m8-km40
The contributions made by the ‘A Good Death?’ are on p.20.
For academic citation: CFA 2024 Programme Team (Eds.) (2024). Emotions in Engagement Toolkit – A practice guide and insights from the Collaborative Futures Academy 2024. Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.
*During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Menagerie Theatre Company and ‘A Good Death?’ collaborated on three new short audio plays, inspired by the research of Dr Laura Davies and the creative insight of writer Patrick Morris.
✦ Seven Arguments with Grief
✦ End of Life Care – A Ghost Story
✦ A Look, A Wave
The audio plays were recorded in lockdown and explore death, dying and bereavement from different perspectives, including a bereaved mother, a hospital doctor, and the voice of a famous painting of a deathbed scene, Nicolas Poussin’s ‘Extreme Unction’ (or ‘Final Anointing’ c.1638-40).
End of Life Care: A Ghost Story
The next audio play is to be listened to on headphones while looking at the original painting or a colour reproduction of ‘Extreme Unction’ from the Seven Sacraments (Series 1) by Nicolas Poussin. Images © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
You can also hear more about the experiences of everyone involved in this collaboration through short video interviews with Laura, Patrick, and the actors who voiced the audio plays, Caroline Rippin and Shane Shambhu.
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At the University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas in 2021, we also premiered a fourth original drama created with Menagerie Theatre. This video play, An Everyday Family Practice, explores the impact on the wider family of the young adult son’s terminal diagnosis. Warm and comic but also deeply moving it grapples with how the diagnosis prompts challenging conversations, and reveals fissures and ruptures in the family, whilst also affording moments of deep connection.
You can watch the short play for free here.
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Menagerie is a new-writing theatre company resident at Cambridge Junction. They develop and produce new plays which engage powerfully, imaginatively and critically with the contemporary world. They do this through the Hotbed Festival, community projects, and the Ideas Stage, an ongoing programme of collaborations with academic researchers that uses theatre to examine key ideas which influence our world.
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The materials on this page are licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. You are welcome to use and share them, and we would love to hear from you about what these plays mean for you and your community.
Join the conversation @what_death #gooddeath
These plays are part of an ongoing collaboration and a larger work in progress. We want to hear your thoughts about them and to be challenged by new perspectives. Join the conversation @what_death #gooddeath