Death, Dying and Beyond: Understanding Ourselves at the End
Death, Dying, and Beyond:
Understanding Ourselves at the End
One-Day Colloquium at UNC-Charlotte Center City
Friday, April 22, 2016
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“If there was no end to life, life would have no value. It is the ever-present danger of losing it which helps to bring home the value of life” (Popper, 1977, p. 148). |
Death gives life meaning, and infuses all forms of communication with heightened symbolism and significance. All of us will die, and in fact, humans are the only creatures with the knowledge of our own death. Understanding death has intrigued scholars, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and medical professionals throughout time. Using a multidisciplinary panel of scholars to explore ideas of what it means to be mortal, and, perhaps, immortal, we will look at death from the cellular to the social. This day-long program will span experiences of death and dying from fields as diverse as biology, communication, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and cultural studies.
COST: Free but registration is required. Register HERE.
Join the Conversation!
For today’s colloquium, we will be live tweeting using the hashtag #UNCCDeath&Beyond. Feel free to join the discussion by re-tweeting or adding your own pearls from the day’s presenters.
Program at a Glance
8:30 am – 9:00 am: Continental Breakfast
9:00 am – 9:30 am: Welcome and Introduction: Dr. Christine Davis
9:30 – 10:00 am: “Frontiers of Resuscitation and Reanimation: When is dead really dead?”
Dr. Mark Clemens
With modern medicine continuing to push back the borders in resuscitation and reanimation, the definition of death continues to blur. This talk will summarize some of the advances and place them in a context of the growing potential tension between medical technology and ethics.
10:00 – 10:30 am: “Quality of Life at End of Life”
Dr. Amy Peterman
Impending mortality creates both huge challenges and opportunities for patients and family members to experience a heightened sense of meaning, purpose, and connection to the larger world. This talk will summarize scientific findings and clinical practice related to this juxtaposition.
10:30 – 11:00 am: BREAK
11:00 – 11:30 am: “Dealing with Grief Before and After Loss”
Dr. Diane Zablotsky
This presentation provides an overview of the grieving process of care providers and loved ones before and after the loss of someone close.
11:30 am – 12:00 noon: “Searching for George Clooney”
Dr. Deborah Breede
Dr. Deborah Breede has been engaged in a long term ethnography at a dementia facility where her mother, who has advanced Alzheimer’s disease, lives. Some of this emergent work includes the notion of reconstituting lost memories and identity in Alzheimer’s patients through narrative remembering and telling; communication complexities within the mother-daughter relationship; learning how to effectively communicate with dementia patients while communication is still possible – and how to communicate within their world when it no longer is; and the development and sustenance of community at end of life. In this new work, she explores the communication of intimate relationships while critiquing the current health care crisis.
12:00 – 1:30 pm: LUNCH
1:30 – 2:00 pm: “Nationalist mythologies of sacrifice: What’s worth dying for?”
Drs. Deborah Breede and Christine Davis
This presentation takes a critical ethnographic approach to visits to national monuments, memorials, and other cultural sites of commemoration and loss; i.e., the Holocaust Museum, the Martin Luther King Memorial, the Einstein Monument; the World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam Veterans Memorial; the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln Monuments; the Arlington and Fredericksburg National Cemeteries; the Pentagon 911 Memorial; and the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial. We discuss how the monuments and memorials serve as cultural discourse to transmit our values of what is worth dying for. We look at how these artifacts of material culture discursively construct heroism, community, social bonds, and symbolic immortality through what Seale (1998) calls “nationalist mythologies of sacrifice.”
2:00 – 2:30 pm: “Lives After Death”
Janna Shedd
This presentation will include a comparative survey of afterlife beliefs using images and words from various religious traditions around the globe. The survey will highlight parallels and differences in ways of conceiving what might happen after death..
2:30 – 3:00 pm: “Vertigo: Death as an Unknown”
Drs. Jonathan Crane and Christine Davis
Using a Terror Management theoretical lens, we explore the intersections of life and death, experience and fiction, as we seek to understand the relationship between the two. We layer a narrative describing communication about death in medical settings; specifically, team-based communication among providers, family members, and pediatric patients with serious and life threatening medical conditions, with a narrative discussion of end-of-life communication from the mediated perspective of popular fiction featuring death and dying as a key part of the story. We address the confusion and chaos experienced as death hunts us down, confuses our senses, makes us lose our equilibrium, and stalls the forward progress of our normal life.
3:00 – 3:15 pm: BREAK
3:15 – 3:30 pm: “Introduction to the Community Conversation”
Dr. Christine Davis
3:30 – 4:45 pm: “Community Conversation: Practice, Ethics, and Compassion at End of Life”
Pediatric Palliative Care Team (PACT), Levine Children’s Hospital, Carolinas Healthcare System:
Laurie Hicks, M.D., Director of Palliative Care, LCH
James D. Sonda, Jr., M.Div., Pediatric Staff Chaplain, LCH
Lynná King, MSN, RN, Director of Nursing, Hospice and Palliative Care of Cabarrus County
Allison Shukraft, LCSWA, Palliative Care Social Worker, LCH
ADDITIONAL ACTIVITY:
Discovery Place, Charlotte’s science museum, is offering discount coupons to all colloquium attendees for their exhibit BODY WORLDS & The Cycle of Life.
The exhibition has created a lot of interesting conversations about death because all anatomical specimens on display in the exhibitions are real. They belonged to people who declared during their lifetime that their body should be made available after their deaths to be part of the BODY WORLDS exhibitions. Many donors emphasize that by donating their body, they can be useful to others even after their death. The exhibition features whole-body plastinates as well as individual organs, organ configurations and translucent body slices, to take the visitor on a journey of discovery under the skin, providing a comprehensive insight into the anatomy and physiology of the human body.
You can use the coupon to attend the exhibit before or after the colloquium or another time.
HOTEL INFORMATION FOR OUT-OF-TOWN ATTENDEES:
The Holiday Inn Charlotte-Center City
Book online or call: 1 800 315 2621
PRESENTERS:
Christine Davis, Ph.D., is Professor of Communication Studies at UNC-Charlotte. Her teaching and research areas are patient-family-provider communication at end-of-life, and in disability and mental health contexts.
Mark G. Clemens, PhD is Professor of Biological Sciences at UNC Charlotte and a faculty fellow in the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics. He is an internationally recognized expert in liver biology including organ preservation and reanimation for transplantation.
Amy Peterman, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the UNC Charlotte Health Psychology doctoral program. Her research has focused on the understanding of spiritual well-being and quality of life among people with cancer and HIV/AIDS.
Diane Zablotsky, Ph.D., is Director of the Levine Scholars Program and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology. She has been teaching courses in Gerontology and Sociology of Death and Dying at UNC Charlotte for more than twenty years. Prior to joining the faculty she worked as a nursing home administrator and social science analyst at the National Institute of Aging.
Deborah Breede, Ph.D., is Professor of Communication, Languages, and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. Her research areas are in the development and sustenance of community within diverse contexts.
Janna Shedd, M.A., is Lecturer in the Religious Studies Department. She specializes in South and East Asian religious traditions and teaches an undergraduate course on Death and the Afterlife in the Summer semesters.
Jonathan Crane, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies. His primary research interest is in the relation between communication technologies, cultural form and shared meaning.
Dr. Laurie Hicks, M.D., is Director of Palliative Care, Levine Children’s Hospital, Pediatric Palliative Care Team, Carolinas Healthcare System. She graduated from Medical College of Georgia in 1986 and specializes primarily in Pediatric Medicine.
Lynná King, MSN, RN, is Director of Nursing with Hospice and Palliative Care of Cabarrus County. Lynná has been a nurse for 17 years in pediatrics, palliative care and hospice and a member of the Carolinas Medical Center Ethics committee for 7 years.
Allie Shukraft, MAT, MSW, LCSWA is a Pediatric Palliative Care Social Worker at Levine Children’s Hospital with Carolinas Palliative Care and Hospice Network. She is a reformed English teacher and enjoys learning and teaching about all things palliative care and can sometimes be found tweeting this information as @alifrumcally.
Jim Sonda, M.Div., is the Staff Chaplain at Levine Children’s Hospital. A Board Certified Chaplain, Jim earned his Masters of Divinity at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, TN and completed his clinical training as a Chaplain at University Medical Center, in Tucson at the U. of Arizona. Over the past 20 years, Jim has walked beside and offered spiritual and emotional support to thousands of children and adults facing their own or someone else’s injury, illness, or death. Jim loves his work, and feels privileged that people allow him to be part of their journey.