Grief matters to everyone. It is a fundamental, universal experience in response to bereavement and non-bereavement losses. Yet, in spite of philosophical grief research gaining momentum in recent years, and making a distinctive contribution by providing novel arguments as well as conceptual and phenomenological analyses, the experiences of many people remain neglected. Existing philosophical work has focused on the universality, rather than the diversity of grief experiences. The guiding assumption of this research is often that grief is unified, characterised by essential features shared across individuals and communities. This assumption has led to a major gap in knowledge hindering progress in our philosophical understanding of grief: It systematically ignores a wide range of grief experiences that are in principle disintegrated and disunified, and, in so doing, compounds feelings of isolation and disconnection of those that suffer them.

The first of the three workshops funded by the ARC Discovery Project ‘Grief at the Margins: Conceptualising the Diversity of Loss,’ this event will bring together leading and emerging scholars working in the philosophy of grief. It will explore the heterogeneous ways in which grief can manifest in lived experience – relationally, temporally, and spatially – and consider some of the implications this heterogeneity may have for questions of identity, possibility, narratability, and significance in grief. 

Confirmed Speakers

Kym MacLaren

Louise Richardson-Self

Becky Millar

Marilyn Stendera

Emily Hughes

Contact

Emily Hughes

emily.hughes@mq.edu.au