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About Dying And Death: Thanatology's Place In Medical Curriculum, Jill Dombroski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study explored how healthcare providers engage in advance care planning and end-of-life care conversations. The research explored what shapes their understanding and the extent to which concepts from thanatology they intuitively bring in, explicitly bring in, and maybe fail to recognize. To achieve this, constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodology guided the design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation of the findings, which allowed for iteration across interviews and analysis with existing theories and data in the literature. The CGT design encouraged further engagement with the literature in an ongoing iterative fashion as well as with the analysis of the data. …

The Hepatic Happening: Confronting Waitlist Death In Liver Transplantation, Anita M. Slominska

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation is narrative-based interdisciplinary investigation of waitlist death that focuses on my sister’s wait for a liver transplant and her death 18 years ago. While the period of waiting for a transplant is accompanied by great life-and-death uncertainty, the possibility of dying is often ignored and overshadowed by an emphasis on redemptive narratives and a “second chance at life.” From the beginning, organ transplantation was a field dominated by hope and the fantasy that biomedicine can overcome illness and mortality; as such it is narrowly understood through a lens of progress where loss, failure and death are given little …

Exquisite Corpses: Markedness, Gender, And Death In Video Games, Meghan Blythe Adams

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation analyzes gendered death animations in video games and the way games thematize death to remarginalize marked characters, including women. This project combines Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s work on the human subjection to death and Georges Bataille’s characterization of sacrifice to explore how death in games stages markedness. Markedness articulates how a culture treats normative identities as unproblematic while marking non-normative identities as deviant.

Chapter One characterizes play as a form of death-deferral, which culminates in the spectacle of player-character death. I argue that death in games can facilitate what Hegel calls tarrying with death, embracing our subjection to …