Arts Ambassador Molly Adams attends her first Research Café and discusses death, dying, and loss.
It’s a surprisingly warm Thursday night at the start of November and about twenty people are gathered in a café just off the high street. Everybody’s chatting casually and enjoying the vegan food Café Thrive has kindly provided and, unlike most socially acceptable groups of people, avidly discussing the permanent elephant in every room. We’re all here to sit and learn more about death.
The Dead Good Days Festival is a month-long series of events across the spectrum of the arts, humanities, and sciences, dedicated to demystifying death, dying, and loss. Across November, events have sprawled across Southampton, spanning music, art, science, and in venues such as cafes, churches, and crematoriums, inviting the public in to learn more and to discuss what we as a culture seem to never discuss until it’s too late. Tonight, the event is the Dead Good Research Café, the latest installment in the University of Southampton’s Research Café series, which involves speakers sharing their findings in a calm, informal environment. These events run throughout the year, hosted by Dr Tony Curran, with a wide range of subject matters (including Brexit on November 16th), allowing interested members of the public to learn about contemporary research in a comfortable setting.
This particular event’s speakers were psychology professor Dr Jacob Juhl and end-of-life companion Alexandra Frosch, who were both allowed thirty minutes to discuss their findings and experiences with us before swapping groups. With Dr Juhl, we discussed death awareness mindsets, specifically terror management strategies (aka the cognitive mechanisms developed that allow us to not constantly be afraid of death) and our own experiences of being terrified with death. The second half of the night, with Alexandra Frosch, involved learning more about her occupation as a ‘death doula’ or end-of-life companion, a person who emotionally and practically supports those in their final days. With such a subject matter as death, it’s almost impossible not to bring your own experiences to the table, and the Research Café genuinely felt like a safe, welcoming environment in which to do so. Universities have always been places of discussion and debate, with events such as the Research Café helping us to formulate informed opinions on a subject we might normally avoid having frank discussion about. The discussions ranged from academic to emotional to anecdotal and back again, with each of us leaving with new, fascinating perspectives, and more importantly providing a venue to verbalise ideas that may otherwise have remained unspoken.
Arts Ambassadors is a paid opportunity, supported by the Careers and Employability Service’s Excel Southampton Internship programme, University of Southampton
