When people ask me about my research they often assume that this is a relentlessly depressing area to work in. There is of course sadness and loss. There is also so much more - wisdom, humour, inventiveness, delight, subterfuge, reinvention. I have learnt many new ways of thinking about and moving through life.

This conversation for the Death Studies podcast will tell you more about me

Death and the Migrant

I spent most of my twenties caring for my father and then my mother, both migrants from Sri Lanka. Life became a very serious business after their deaths. It was the first time that I began to think consciously about belonging and loss - and this part of migration trajectories that is so often neglected.

My book Death and the Migrant is a book of sociological stories, bringing together my work on migration, illness and death that began in the mid-1990s.

You can think of the book as a compilation of short stories about migrant lives and end of life care, where there is an interweaving of oral history and contextual detail. Some of the stories might resonate with your own experiences or at least stir points of contrast. You can also read the book as a fleshy account of geo-social politics from below. A different way of approaching scholarly concerns and debates about global markets, borders, transnational networks and multicultural hospitality. If you are a care practitioner I hope that the book will have relevance to your everyday work and dilemmas, adding other perspectives to policy, pedagogical and clinical initiatives that aim to improve care.

Here are some themes from the book. 

Hospitality -  I go back to the story of the contemporary hospice movement and the professional chameleon, Cicely Saunders, (philosopher/nurse/social worker/doctor), who is regarded as inspiring modern hospices. Cicely credits her ideas about hospice care to her relationship, in 1948, with a dying Polish Jew and refugee David Tasma. Saunders’ idealised vision for the first modern hospice - St Christopher’s in South London - sounds so apt for our global multicultures  ‘A working community of the unalike’.

At the time when Cicely and David met, the National Health Service was in its formative years, recruiting migrant care professionals and other care workers to supplement post-war labour deficiencies. This ‘perverse subsidy’ has continued and to the detriment of the economies and households from which migrants come.

Our care services are indebted to migrants. These are debts and gifts are easily forgotten in the present, even with Danny Boyle's tribute to the NHS, in the Olympics opening ceremony in 2012. The care workers who tended to the birth and infancy of the National Health Service are now ageing. For the first time as patients some of them will walk through the main entrance of the places in which they have laboured. They will be looked in the face. They will be addressed by their names. Some will occupy the waiting rooms, wards and beds that they have cleaned and serviced. The child that they have nurtured will in turn care for them.

What will happen now that the roles are reversing?

Debility - Several of the chapters in the book are about the multisensory experience of disability and disease at the end of life and how migration and cultural and language differences can affect dying. Inspired by feminist, queer and disability studies, I have been interested in thinking about the experience and symbolism of debilitated migrant bodies and how social pain and suffering can become entangled with physical pain at the end of life.

Care - In Death and the Migrant, I am interested in what good care is and in what it might be. I work very much from within the existing terms and philosophies of palliative care and its utopian philosophy of ‘total pain’ that recognizes pain as being physical, psychological, social and spiritual. Within the domains of total pain, the bodily suffering caused by a tumour pressing on the spinal cord and the emotional loss of legs that can no longer dance, are ideally both recognized as pain. The thinking and aspirations of palliative care and total pain have shaped and inspired the methods, writing and stories in Death and the Migrant.