Whose death literacy do you want me to have? Exploring over-medicalisation, inequalities and knowledge production as part of community-engaged work at the end of life.

Mary Hodgson, St Christopher’s Hospice In this keynote Mary examines the concept of over-medicalisation and what it might mean to address by examining how we produce and exchange knowledge about the end of life. She asks, what role could interrogating knowledge production play in tackling inequalities and over-medicalisation and how could it lead to change?

To explore this, Mary looks at how a community action team in a hospice in South East London is using a death literacy approach as a way to produce and share knowledge. This approach sets out to facilitate an exchange of viewpoints and voices on death, dying and loss; make visible polyvocal representations of death and dying; and, ultimately, amplify how community members in different settings identify what contemporary dying looks like in order to make meaning out of the end of life.

Through critiquing contemporary approaches to knowledge production about end of life and what is ‘wrong’ with it, along with a range of projects and depictions of dying from community settings, in this keynote she hopes to challenge the audience to reflect on the possibilities of generative and potentially more democratic ways to share knowledge about end of life issues, and their associated challenges and opportunities.