European projects ERC Starting Grants
ENDofLIFE
2020-2025
The main aim of this project is to understand what is universally shared and what is culturally specific in end-of-life care, analyzing how local end-of-life care practices impact palliative care and how globally circulating discourses on palliative care transform local notions of death and dying. In just a few decades, palliative care has become widely associated with a good death in high-income countries. Given the current international focus on extending palliative care to the Global South, it is essential to better understand how such care is or is not translated in various cultural contexts. This project develops a new analytical approach that focuses on the dynamic interplay between the global mobility and articulation of palliative care discourses, national-level institutional care assemblages and local trajectories of end-of-life care. To discover how this interplay works in practice, ethnographic research will be conducted in international organizations and in three countries with emerging palliative care services: Brazil, India and Indonesia.
Host institution: Universiteit Leiden (Netherlands)
For more information:
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/851437
https://erc.easme-web.eu
EOLinPLACE
2022-2026
As far as possible, deaths should take place where the individual wishes. We know that most people would prefer to die at home, but many die in hospital. Until now, science has failed to capture the dynamics and diversity of preferences and places where people are cared for at the end of life. Current classifications of places of death are incomplete and inconsistent. This project aims to reform the classification and understanding of places of death, refining and shifting the focus from the end point (place of death) to the journey that precedes it. The aim is to develop a solid basis for a pioneering international classification tool that maps preferred and actual places towards death according to what they mean to individuals (beyond a purely physical or medical view). This is achieved by combining classic methods of health classification development with a bottom-up participatory research approach, working with patient and family representatives. This research will open up new ways of caring for the dying.
Host institution: Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal)
For more information:
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/948609
https://erc.easme-web.eu
DEATHREVOL
2021-2026
The emergence of funerary behavior is one of the most controversial aspects in the field of human evolution. New methodological approaches in the field of taphonomy can help elucidate fundamental facets of hominini behavior, making important contributions to our understanding of our ancestors. The European fossil record is an essential source of information due to the relative abundance of fossil skeletons, many of which have been interpreted as burials, and the possibility of biological and cultural interactions between different human species. Nevertheless, direct taphonomic analyses of these human fossils are rare. DEATHEREVOL is a multi-disciplinary research project aimed at investigating the origins of funerary behavior during the Middle Pleistocene, and at tracing this behavior throughout the European Paleolithic archaeological record. This project involves the participation of a large team of researchers and a network of methods including classical and innovative taphonomic analyses, virtual reconstructions for forensic analysis, the study of spatial distribution patterns, the global relationship of different sites, and mathematical models to interconnect the wide spectrum of data collected. In particular, the results will help determine whether mortuary practices and a culture of death, preceded the appearance of modern humans and Neanderthals.
Host institution: Centro nacional de investigacion sobre la evolucion humana (Spain).
For further information:
https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/949330/fr
https://erc.easme-web.eu