What is to become of us?

What is to become of us? Lessons from an interdisciplinary science of human dying 

For many years the study of dying was indistinct, and commonly conflated (and confused) with a study of ‘death & dying’. This conflation of word and image was no accident not least because, in the late 20th century mind, the awareness that life would soon end presaged social oblivion and personal annihilation.

To make matters worse, medical studies of the end of life frequently described the experience of dying as short, often nasty, and catastrophically sad. Everything described and conjectured about ‘what is to become of us in the end’ most approximated a train wreck.

But is any of this really true? Against this background of popular and medical distortion, this lecture draws upon the last 40-years of the interdisciplinary science of dying to look afresh at our eternal and most pressing existential question: what really does become of us as we lay dying?

About the Speaker

Professor Allan Kellehear, PhD, FAcSS is a medical and public health sociologist. He received his sociology training from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. His research and writing reflect longstanding interests in two academic areas. The first area of interest is the history, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology of human dying behavior and experiences. These studies examine dying conduct in illness (palliative, ageing, cancer, and intensive care) and non-illness contexts (war, disasters, death camps, death row, suicide) and from 12 months to a few hours either side of the clinical pronouncement of death. 

Professor Kellehear's work ranges from studies of prolonged dying from chronic illness, debates on the determination of death (brain death), to mystical/altered states of consciousness among adults and children near-death (near-death experiences, deathbed visions, terminal lucidity).

His other field of research is the development and assessment of public health (health promotion) practices for care of the dying, caregivers, and the bereaved. He is interested in the application of public health strategies for community development, social ecology, public education, services redesign, and civic policy development to create or enhance practices for communities participating in end-of-life care. He is widely recognized as founder and one of the leading advocates of the international public health movement in palliative care, also known as the ‘compassionate community’ or the ‘health promoting palliative care’ approach. This approach has been incorporated into national palliative care policies in many countries around the world, including the UK.

Professor Kellehear worked internationally as a university professor in Australia (La Trobe University), Japan (University of Tokyo), England (Universities of Bath, Middlesex, and Bradford), and the USA (Universities of Minnesota and Vermont). With Julian Abel, he is co-editor of the Oxford Textbook of Public Health Palliative Care (2022) and a contributing author to the Lancet Commission Report on the Value of Death (2022). He has been an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences since 2011; co-founder and Associate Director of the national charity Compassionate Communities UK; and a past President of both the Association for the Study of Death and Society and Public Health Palliative Care International. He is an honorary professor in theology and religion at Durham University, and in family medicine at McMaster University Medical School in Canada. He joined Northumbria University in 2024 as Professor in Health and Social Care.