Rationalitäten des Lebensendes

In recent decades, the cultural, social, medical and political handling of the end of life has been subject to fundamental change. Against the background of the rise of chronic diseases and longer dying processes, new problems have occurred, leading, amongst other things, to new conceptions of terminal care. In this volume, experts from various disciplines (ethnology, history, media and communication studies, medicine, nursing science and sociology) analyse the current debate on dying, death and bereavement and its relevance to society. The articles the book contains focus on key developments at the end of a life, such as current concepts in palliative and hospice care, individual prevention practices and public representations in the (digital) media landscape, and address their institutional and sociocultural contexts. In doing so, they challenge several truisms of previous research that arose due to close connections between social protest and scholarship.

With contributions by
Florian Greiner; Julia Dornhöfer; Anna Wagner, Manuel Menke, Susanne Kinnebrock and Marina Drakova; Michaela Thönnes; Lilian Coates; Mara Kaiser; Sabine H. Krauss; Anna Kitta; Anna D. Bauer; Anke Offerhaus; Thorsten Benkel and Werner Schneider