Workshop | Palliative Care and Assisted Dying: Stories of the End of Life Event

Aerial view of part of Highfield Campus, with greenery and buildings shown against a clear, blue sky.

Time:: 17:00-19:30
Date:: 2025-06-05 17:00:00
Venue:: Building 2, Room 1039, Highfield Campus

Event details

You are warmly invited to attend two connected events on assisted dying that have been co-organised by SIAH and the Southampton Centre for Medical and Health Humanities (SCMHH):

The question of assisted dying has recently acquired a fresh relevance in the UK, with the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill progressing through second reading and committee stage at Westminster, and the arguments for and against its introduction are closely bound to contemporary understandings of the role and remit of palliative care.

Led by two members of Assisted Lab – an academic, nonpartisan research lab concerned with patient stories of assisted dying, based at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland – this interactive workshop will explore in detail this relationship between palliative care and assisted dying.

Format

With a focus on stories told by patients in blogs, films, and photographic exhibitions, this workshop aims to clarify the synergies and tensions between palliative care and assisted dying provision. It will therefore begin with short presentations discussing international variants of this relationship, including in France, Switzerland, and Canada, before turning to examples of cultural works that explore these synergies and tensions in their specific socio-cultural contexts.

The second part of the workshop will involve discussion of the cultural productions and the questions raised by them in relation to assisted dying and palliative care provision. These discussions will also draw the personal and professional experiences of workshop attendees, connecting their lived experiences with the insights offered by the cultural works, in order to meaningfully reflect on the cultural, ethical, moral, political and societal issues at stake. With a view to maximizing audience participation and debate, the second part of the workshop will seek responses from as broad a range of interested actors as possible.

The workshop will conclude with a reflective response from Dr Aude Campmas, co-director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Southampton.

Learning Objectives

Through participation in the workshop, participants will:

Sharpen narrative analysis skills to better understand the relationship between palliative care and assisted dying in a number of national contexts.
Gain an understanding of different cultural models of that relationship, as well as the concrete historical circumstances and personalities that shaped it in different jurisdictions.
Understand the importance of cultural resources as key mediators of common approaches to the end of life.
Develop communication skills related to discussing merits and drawbacks of medical assistance in dying with people who hold different opinions.

Speaker information

Marc Keller holds a PhD in Modern German Literature from the University of Bern, Switzerland. In his doctoral thesis, he examined how contemporary German- and French-speaking literature and film address the question of existential suffering as a motif for assisted dying. He is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland, where he works as part of the European Research Council-funded project Assisted Lab (www.assistedlab.ch).

Jordan McCullough is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Gallen. His current research, as part of the European Research Council-funded Assisted Lab (www.assistedlab.ch), focuses on cultural narratives of assisted dying and their impact on politics and law-making. His wider research interests are at the intersection of French and francophone studies and the medical humanities, with a particular focus on end-of-life care, death, grief and mourning. He is also an Associate Editor of The Polyphony, an online platform for medical humanities research.

Event Information

Guests can join this event in person at Highfield, University of Southampton. We encourage guests who wish to join in person to register at your earliest opportunity as spaces are strictly limited.

If you have any questions about this event please email fahevent@soton.ac.uk .