This work represents the voices of 29 young people aged between 10 and 17, all of whom volunteered to come together in small • self-selected friendship groups to explore the meaning of death within their everyday lives. At my request they placed individually chosen household objects that evoked death for them in shoe boxes and brought them for discussion. The artefacts • were many and varied and elicited a wide exploration of death. A significant number of objects were connected to cultural sources, such as literature, cinema and television. More personal effects were equally evident, bringing highly individual encounters with death to the fore, and a collection of more unusual objects -allowed for thoughtful reflections. This study sits within the 'new sociology of childhood' paradigm, situating these young people as active social agents, experts in their own social worlds, and having rights to participation and having their voices heard. Equally, an approach, premised upon doing no harm and a 'feminist ethic of care' was centrally important. Kastenbaum and Fox (2007) have argued that adults assume young people do not, cannot and should not think about death. The findings here challenge this view by revealing young people's lively engagement with this topic in a number of distinct areas. Cultural resources were used to inform their perspectives on, and responses to death, but also to challenge many of these as unreal and unauthentic. Personal narratives of loss, and memories of loved ones revealed a variety of encounters with significant deaths, the stories being told in an array of vibrant, amusing and emotive ways. Similarly, death was explored from a variety of religious and scientific frameworks, highlighting rich and changing perspectives. Such shifting and exciting vistas are a largely undiscovered part of young people's lives and situate them in a landscape not often associated with childhood.

Walter’s The Revival of Death (1994) is a core sociological text which provides the dominant methodological approach to academic reflections concerning death-related behaviour within historical English society in the field of Religious Studies. This thesis provides the first extensive academic critique of Walter’s ideal types of death detailed within his Revival of Death, identifying his misinterpretation and misrepresentation of Webarian ideals which form the foundational structure of his death typology. Removing Walter’s types of death from their idealised context, this study argues that his death typology provides a superficial perception of socio-historical attitudes towards death, which not only negates the effect that gender and class distinction had on societal behaviour, but that his typology is prone to variation and expansion when scrutinised. This thesis expands Walter’s traditional era into three snapshots of history: the Middle Ages (c.1000-1535), the Protestant Reformation (c.1536-1660), and the nineteenth century (c.1800-1901), and utilising Walter’s own typological structure, critically explores and challenges the cohesiveness of the Bodily and Social Contexts of his Traditional type, which are determined by his formulation of a singular Archetypal Death. Through the theoretical implementation of various possible Archetypal Deaths into Walter’s typological structure, namely plague, leprosy, syphilis and tuberculosis, which in turn will be characterised as either morally or physically threatening, this thesis challenges the simplification of Walter’s Traditional type of death which destabilises his whole typology. The justification for these alternative Archetypical Deaths is evidenced through their prolificity within contemporary popular literature; popular literature acts methodologically within this thesis as crucial resources which serve to complicate, contextualise and identify correlations and commonalities of socio-historical death-related behaviour in England c.1000-1901. Thus, by critically exploring Walter’s Traditional death type in relation to representations of plague, leprosy, tuberculosis and syphilis in contemporary popular literature, this thesis seeks to establish whether the sociological typologisation of death is possible without creating homogeneity, and further method of transmitting knowledge.

This is an ethnomethodological study of qualitative research interviews concerning the death of a spouse. The focus is on the accounting practices of interview participants. Methods of analysis described by Sacks, membership categorisation analysis (MCDA) and conversation analysis (CA), have been applied to the data. The analysis also draws on Sacks's discussions of storytelling. Three different but related issues are examined in the data: criticism of health professionals, assessment work and doing interview talk. MCDA has been used to document how criticisms of health professionals are produced and to examine how assessment work is done. Criticism involves setting up lay and professional identities, and recipient-design. Interviewees venture their criticisms cautiously, setting up their accounts in such a way that the hearer is co-implicated. A feature of the detailed assessment work undertaken in the accounts is the setting up of entitlements to certain experiences by interviewees, such as being with a spouse when they die. The way in which the identities of the speakers in the (interview) talk are established in the opening turns has been examined using CA. The opening request by the interviewer, 'could you tell me the story of what happened' is produced as an openended question but the response provided is skilfully tied to a story that the interviewer expects to hear. Implications of the analysis are drawn regarding the status of interview data. The value of attending to the accounting practices of participants in producing interview data is also discussed in relation to lay assessments of health care.

Two studies were undertaken to investigate grief in adults with learning difficulties. Study one involved the construction of an observer rated grief inventory which showed good reliability and certain aspects of validity. Using the grief inventory it was demonstrated that primary carers of learning disabled adults perceived a significant change in clients post bereavement. There was no association between levels of expressive and receptive language or degree of dependency upon the deceased and grief inventory ratings. Similarly no differences were established on the basis of gender,expected/unexpected death, attendance/non attendance at funeral, maintenance/change of residence as a result of bereavement or presence/absence of religious beliefs.

This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of a group intervention with 12 bereaved children, aged 8-12. All of the children had been bereaved of a parent within the past 2 years. Due to the small number of children available for inclusion in the study, 6 of the children had previously received individual professional help for grief related issued. The design was a repeated measure pre and post intervention between group design. The study compared the two sub-groups of bereaved children with a group of non-bereaved children who were matched in terms of age and sex.

This thesis is predicated upon a rejection of the existing characterisation of attitudes towards the dead in the eighteenth century. In current thinking this period witnessed the first signs of a reduction in the extent to which people had contact with the dead. However, this assumption is supported by very little research. In focusing on proximity and exposure to the dead body at an ‘everyday’ level this thesis tempers the century’s association with distance and change by revealing a high level of proximity and very significant continuities with both the preceding and proceeding periods. Utilising sources from London, Bristol and York it follows the dead body from the point of death through to its eventual resting place, concentrating in particular on the impact of the newly-emerged undertaking trade and burial practice in the century and a half prior to the widespread establishment of extramural cemeteries and eventual outlawing of burial in towns. The following key questions are addressed: how were spaces shared between the living and the dead; where exactly were the dead present; who had contact with them; and in what ways. The result is a picture which demonstrates that during the long eighteenth century the living shared their private and public urban spaces with the dead to a significant extent. The attitudes governing treatment of the dead body revealed in the process are shown to be at once timeless and period-specific. Foremost among these is the concept of ‘decency’. It is shown that this idea, whilst far from unique to the eighteenth century, had a particular contemporary significance shaped by social and economic factors and their effects on the class structure and urban environment. At the same time, visible in all aspects of treatment of the dead is a pragmatism born of limitations on time and, in particular, space which did not always sit easily with notions of decency, particularly once the dead were underground.

This thesis explores the experiences of individuals living in a family where a member is dying or has a life-threatening illness. It focuses in particular upon how families are actively produced in the everyday `doing' of day-to-day family life (Morgan, 1996) in circumstances of severe ill-health and when facing death. Using an ethnographic approach combining informal, in-depth interviews with 9 families and participant observation on a hospice ward, the research provides insight into how families experience themselves as family in the `here-and-now' of their daily lives. It will be argued that in both popular culture and theoretical work there is a pervasive tendency to associate death with crisis and that the more ordinary, everyday and mundane aspects of dying experiences are less well understood. Therefore, the analysis of family lives presented here moves away from the more familiar model of emotional crisis and rupture in relation to severe ill-health and dying, to ask new questions about the `everydayness' of people's feelings and experiences during this time. A more nuanced picture of living with life-threatening illness and dying is provided as the data chapters explore the everyday and mundane in relation to families' experiences. Analysing empirical data about various aspects of dayto- day life - including eating practices, spatial dynamics and material objects - the thesis shows how ill-health and dying are not discrete ontological experiences existing outside and separate from everyday life. Rather, in paying attention to the `doing' of being a family day-to-day, this research brings more squarely into view, the everyday as a lived experience (Felski, 1999) within which families come to `know' their experiences of illness and dying.

Although psychical research identified through structured research the commonality of anomalous experiences for the bereaved from as early as the 1880s, it wasn’t until the 1970s with the publication of a medical doctorate on such phenomena that medical communities and social science began to recognise them too. Beyond this point, research became more popular on the subject. Extensive research conducted on post-death experiences (aka, Post-Death Contacts – ADCs) since the 1970s, has largely focused on what impact they have on the bereaved, rather than the ontology of the phenomena themselves. All such studies have found these experiences to be therapeutic for the bereaved, and a natural aid to recovery. However, no research findings to this point have been presented on what cognitive mechanisms create the therapeutic gains experienced, as a direct result of the spontaneous anomalous experiences. This thesis set out to investigate what makes such experience therapeutic, and aid the process of recovery from grief. From a critical review of the previous literature, it was noted that several of the extensive studies, and related popular literature, identified hope to a consistent reported outcome of such experiences. However, no existing studies appeared to have investigated its presence and process in this context. Therefore, a mixed method study design was developed to investigate the impact of such experiences further and the role of hope within them. A questionnaire approach of validated scales found levels of hope to be significantly higher in groups of the bereaved who do report post-death experience than those who don’t. The bereaved who do not report such experiences appear to encounter a significant drop in hope. Content and thematic analyses were conducted on written feedback of experiences collected from the questionnaires; this highlighted the variety of experiences and their commonality. It also highlighted significant shifts in ‘states of mind’ from negative to positive emotions, from the point of loss, to following the first anomalous encounter. Continued bonds with the deceased were also expressed, as well as previously noted therapeutic gains and themes of hope. In-depth interviews were conducted as the final study of this thesis, with an interpretative phenomenological analysis applied to the data. New findings are presented on the personal changes that take place within post-death events. Experients defined hope and how they saw it acting within their lives and experiences as a support system to feelings of loss, which fell in line with previous positive psychology theories on hope. Several key points are concluded. Firstly, the findings of this thesis have practical applications to clinical practice surrounding palliative care and applied positive psychology, regarding the importance of anomalous experiences encountered by the bereaved. Secondly, the thesis and its findings demonstrate the multi-disciplinary approaches which can be taken to parapsychological issues, in this case combining positive psychology, thanatology and healthcare. And finally, the thesis highlights the usefulness of the mixed method approaches, to provide ‘sweeping maps’ of any given phenomena under investigation, particularly in cases where the previous research findings are limited or are yet to be explored.

In this thesis I argue that the category Near-Death Experience (NDE) emerged in the late-twentieth century, and is structured by the discourses of 'Medicine' and 'Science', and the wider discursive factors of the 'Spiritual Marketplace'. Within NDE literature, the experiences of people coming out of their bodies in Operating Theatres, and then travelling to other realms, are considered to have parallels in the accounts of mystics, shamans, and religious visionaries of other cultures and other times. Against this, I argue that the category of the NDE does not "articulate the same field of discourse" (Foucault, 1969:24-25) as these other religious accounts. NDE researchers sift through these accounts in search of a common thread, but miss the wider social fabric of the religious narratives they seek to excavate, as well as the discursive location that structures their own research. In order to reposition this debate within its own history of ideas, I argue that the category "NDE" is itself dependent on the Operating Theatre for its emergence and initial appeal, and it is the Operating Theatre that makes the discourse of NDEs possible. Within the last 120 years, there have been many attempts to intersect science with anomalous experiences on the fringes of human consciousness: Psychical Research categorised deathbed visions in a wider schemata that was interested in how the fringes of the subconscious mind might yield evidence of another reality; contemporary Parapsychology looked at third-person accounts of deathbed visions recounted to Nurses and Doctors across the globe. Neither of these iscourses had the crossover into the wider 'public sphere' that Raymond Moody's book Life After Life (1975) did, a book that recounts first-person accounts of normal people, caught in extreme medical emergencies, who come out of their bodies, witness the medical teams' attempt to resuscitate them, visit a heavenly realm, and return to tell people about it. What is unique about the NDE is not the vision of a world after death, but the context in which this vision occurs. In Chapter 2 I explore that context by arguing that Psychical Researchers' investigation of mediums, apparitions, and deathbed visions sought to prove that posthumous existence of the Other (that is, one's relatives or friends who had passed on to the other side), and indirectly the Self. (Conversely, NDE research, seeks to prove the existence of the Self, and indirectly, the Other.) In Chapter 3 I examine how Medicine and the Modern Hospice Movement shaped the conditions of emergence of the category 'NDE'. The removal of 'death' from the public sphere into the private sphere of the West meant that death became something exotic. The idea that death was a defeat for modern medicine lead to the emergence of the modern Hospice movement, which opened up a space for the visions of those close to death to be recounted in the public sphere. The recounting of such experiences encapsulates a narrative that includes the Surgeon's intervention, the technology used in the Operating Theatre, and of the everyday man or woman talking about their visions, all of which gives these experiences a cultural currency that sets them apart from other religious and/or New Age accounts. In chapter 4 I recognise that, for these experiences to have an appeal, they must have a market to appeal to. Thus, I examine the 'Spiritual Marketplace', and argue that the NDE researchers fundamentally misread the appeal of their life after death accounts. NDE researchers felt that they had uncovered publicly verifiable evidence for life after death, which they expected to shake the foundations of Western society. Instead, these accounts were read as a curio in the privacy of the spiritual consumer's home, an interesting account that suggested death might not be the end of existence, but little else. When their vision of a spiritual revolution failed to materialise, the founders of the NDE movement fell into a bitter war about the precise signification of the category NDE, thus giving an indication of the fundamental indeterminacy of the category. In chapter 5 I explore how NDE research intersects with the discourse of "Science". I therefore examine the construction of science, the function of science, and the limits of science in NDE literature. I begin by examining how the narratives of science permeate NDE literature, and how all sides implicitly reinforce a binary of Science/Religion that emphasises the former as objective and neutral, and the latter as irrational belief. I then argue that, ultimately, NDEs happen at the very limits of human experience in a realm far outside of what can be answered by direct scientific observation; the debate tells us more about the different metaphysical presumptions present than it does about whether or not science can answer the question 'is there life after death?" In chapter 6 I argue that, in the discourse surrounding NDEs, death and mysticism become entwined as the 'exotic other'. I therefore examine how the categories 'death' and 'mysticism' are themselves both bound up in a particular web of signification. The NDE secures its own identity against an understanding of death born in clinical medicine and, latterly, Freudian psychoanalysis: death becomes a point, after which there is an unknown. Similarly, the NDE inherits an understanding of Mysticism that can be traced back to William James. Nevertheless, the understanding of 'death' throughout history is not fixed but fluid, depending on a myriad of cultural and social discourses. Similarly, the modern psychological definition of 'mysticism' as an ineffable, subjective experience is extremely narrow in comparison to the accounts of mystics in the Middle Ages. When the understanding of these two categories changes, the emphasis upon securing 'evidence' for life after death evaporates. This point is missed in contemporary NDE research that assumes that its own desire to find evidence of life after death is reflective of a universal need for humans to believe in religion: whilst NDE researchers believe that they have finally uncovered a window on to another world, I have argued that this is, in fact, a mirror of their own particular predilections and desires.