These are the members of our academic advisory board:
Yvon van der Pijl
I am an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. My work explores cross-cultural meanings of death, dying, and disposal across scales. I am particularly interested in how end-of-life issues, on the one hand, and pre- and post-mortem care arrangements and ritual practices on the other, are generative of change and various forms of belonging. In doing so, I also focus on dying, death, extinction, and the grievability of more-than-human beings and life forms, exploring the ritualization of climate pain and ecological grief.
Kate Woodthorpe
Dr Kate Woodthorpe is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Bath, where she is director of the Centre for Death and Society. Dr Woodthorpe has conducted funded research and published widely on funeral practices, costs and families at the end of life. She has advised multiple UK Government departments on funerals and funeral policy, and most recently was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to explore state support for funerals around the world.
Nur Yasemin Ural
Nur Yasemin Ural is a sociologist and currently a senior researcher in the research group ‘Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities’ at Leipzig University. She studied sociology and political science in Turkey, France, Canada and Germany. She received her doctorate in sociology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales Paris on the topic of burial practices of Muslim minorities and the politicisation of religion in France and Germany. Her main research interests are ethnic and religious minorities, sociology of emotions and affects, secularism and Islam in Europe. She is co-editor of the book Affect and Emotion in Multi-Religious Secular Societies, Routledge 2019 and co-author of the book Politics of Affective Societies: An Interdisciplinary Essay, transcript 2019. Her last project deals with the affectivity and materiality of the secular-religious divide from a historical and legal perspective in Europe.
Brenda Mathijssen
Avril Maddrell
Ruth McManus