While eco-lightbulbs, tiny homes and bans on single-use plastic bags nibble at the edges of our profligate ways, ecological and social sustainability is beginning to profoundly challenge long-standing death styles. This collection brings together new scholarship on multiple and innovative changes to managing the dead from around the world, including the USA, Poland, the Netherlands, Britain, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, to argue for a new perspective in theorising this shift to more sustainable death ways. This is a perspective that moves on from a top-down approach to social change,...

Death is one of the most challenging aspects of living, demanding inventive and meaningful responses. This insightful collection demonstrates cultural commitment to improving the conditions of the dying and dead and also documents the varied, creative ways that we, the living, already respond to death. Collectively, the 16 essays are an interrogation of the commonly held assumption that death is somehow hidden, denied, or done badly as standard practice. The underpinning themes and narratives in this anthology make a significant contribution to death studies debates and conversations by...