About the Living Well with the Dead Research Cluster

The Living Well with the Dead Cluster brings together researchers across the University and beyond with an interest in contemporary and historical relations, responsibilities and responses to the dead across a range of disciplines, including Anthropology, Applied Social Studies, Archaeology, Music, History, Law, Pathology, Theatre and Performance Studies. 

Members of this strongly interdisciplinary research cluster have hosted events and researched and published widely on social and legal imaginaries of the dead and necropolitical matters, focusing on issues such as the use of the disenfranchised dead in medical research and education; the rights of the dead, the materiality of the corpse, and the ongoing absence-presence of both in the lives of the living; and caring for legacy medical collections.  

*The image that leads from the Research Clusters page to this page is Ballyvorney Gobnait Shrine. Photo credit: Róisin O'Gorman

Cluster Aims and Objectives

• Develop innovative frameworks for studying death and the dead: Advance new conceptual and interdisciplinary approaches that push beyond existing scholarship and open up novel ways of understanding death, dying, and afterlife existence.
• Interrogate ethical and regulatory challenges: Examine emerging and unresolved ethical, legal, and policy questions surrounding human remains, including governance, consent, and accountability in contemporary contexts
• Address inequalities and overlooked perspectives in death practices: Bring critical attention to underrepresented, marginalised, or contested experiences of death and after-death care, with a focus on structural inequalities.
• Explore evolving relationships with the dead in changing contexts: Investigate how technological, environmental, and social transformations are reshaping how the living engage with, remember, and care for the dead.
• Enable cross-sector collaboration and knowledge exchange: Facilitate partnerships between academia, cultural institutions, and professional sectors to support shared learning and practical innovation.
• Translate research into public and policy impact: Contribute to contemporary debates and decision-making through events, outputs, and engagement that inform public understanding and policy development.

Research Projects

Linked to cluster themes  

• Making Body Disposal in Ireland Environmentally and Socially Sustainable (2025-2027): This project, funded by Research Ireland, responds to changing social and demographic trends in Ireland, as well as emerging technologies within the global funeral industry.
• Caring for and about University Legacy Collections (2025): Responding to urgent challenges to imagine and enact radically new ways of caring for and about legacy medical collections, this project, funded by UCC Collective Social Futures, aimed to  foster new intradisciplinary partnerships involving Irish and international scholars from the social sciences, humanities, law and medicine, together with museum practitioners.  
• Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland (2018-19): This project, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust, aimed to develop a medical humanities network equipped with a new and shared vocabulary that goes beyond existing intellectual frameworks to research changing Irish social imaginaries of living well with the dead.