How Do we Tell the Children?

‘Death and Dying’ has almost disappeared from everyday life. They are hidden away in hospitals or hospices and often take place away or outside the inner family circle and yet, we have to learn to cope and live with loss. In contemporary society the Death Café movement and organisations such as Dying Matters aim to raise awareness about death and dying: we need to prepare for the ends of our lives. Death once so ‘familiar’ (Ariès 1974) has become the biggest threat of our life. Why do we now fear it so much? Can we make taking about death and dying any easier?

This event, open to all irrespective of religious affiliation and to those who have none, will bring together members of the public, practitioners, creative artists and scholars working across the arts, humanities, sciences and theology, whose work, research and working/creative practices relate to death and dying.

Our intention is to explore how approaches to mortality and the afterlife have changed since the early modern period - as reflected in the literature, art, history and sciences, as well as in funereal and mourning practices and rituals. This year (the project academic and creative responses to death and dying at BGU is in its fourth year) the conference is supported by the Church Universities Fund. Our focus is the pastoral care of children.

Our aim is to engage with a difficult topic academically as well as creatively and through conversation. We do not offer any solutions or remedies.

Proposals for 20-minute talks and workshops (up to 3 hours) are invited from participants working in any discipline, and at all career stages or professions. All sessions are intended as starting points for interdisciplinary exchange and discussion, which is why the academic components need to be short and informal. Our audience is fellow academics, practitioners, pastors and artists as well as students and the general public.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Theological Reflections on Death, Dying, the Pastoral Care of the Dying and Funereal Practices
• Literature written for Children
• Creative Writing (for Children)
• Death, Children and the Gothic
• Death, Children and Art
• Death, Children and Spirituality
• Therapeutic and religious approaches to working with Children
• Neuro-Diversity / Disability Studies, Children and Grief
• Wellbeing and Grief for Children
• Grief in Children’s Education
• Children’s Understanding and Experience of Grief
• Children’s Grief in the Media and Popular Culture
• Death, Grief and Diversity in Children’s Lives

The event will include a Concert (29 February 2020), a visit to the Cathedral (display in Wren Library and tombs floor tour) BGU Library (display of Picture Books) as well as Death Café and a Quiet Room for reflection.

The question of what is appropriate to tell children can be part of the approach or be discussed afterwards. All proposals will be anonymously peer-reviewed.