Special Lecture :
"Current Developments in Death Studies in the UK and Europe"

On April 8 (Thursday) an open lecture by Grennys Howarth, a professor at the University of Bath, was held at the University of Tokyo.

Professor Howarth discussed the developments and the changing approach of Death Studies in the United Kingdom. Specifically, she outlined the approaches to the topic of "death" in researches from Humanities discipline. Professor Howarth also discussed how the approaches of clinical practice that takes place in areas of "death" and the elements of researches from bioethical research have intersected, diverged, and related to each other historically. In these discussions, she illuminated how the death studies in the U.K differs from that of the U.S. (and Japan which was heavily influenced by the American death studies). For instance, the bioethical researches in the U.K is conducted by the experts in clinical practice, and that bioethics as a discipline is not necessarily an "independent" field in the U.K. Moreover, in the recent years, clinical researches tend to cooperate with the researches and project from the Humanities disciplines in the U.K. What is different, however, is that unlike other cases of cooperation between medical and humanities projects that tends to rely on religion as a component of practice, projects in the U.K does not seem keen to focus on religion.

During the question and answer period, discussions included topics of education about death in schools. Professor Allan Kellehear who also studies similar topics in Australia was in the audience, and the dialogues included comparisons of death studies among the U.K, Australia, and Japan.