NCA 2026 CfP Paper Session Death and Dying as Social (Interactional) Move/ments
| NCA 26 Death Dying | |
|---|---|
| Type | Conference |
| Categories (tags) | Uncategorized |
| Dates | 2026/02/12 - 2026/03/13 |
| Link | |
| Address | New Orleans, Louisiana, USA |
| Geolocation | |
| Abstract due | |
| Submission deadline | 2026/03/13 |
| Final version due | |
| Notification date | |
| Tweet | CfP NCA 26 - High Density Paper panel Death & Dying in Interaction (LSI Division). Any topics around death and dying in interaction welcome! Please see full call for contact information! #Death #Dying #Natcom #NCA26 |
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NCA 2026 CfP Paper Session Death and Dying as Social (Interactional) Move/ments:
Details:
Overall Description Death and dying are at the center of contemporary biomedical and cultural social move/ments that emphasize dignity at end of life. LSI research has long addressed various aspects within death and dying. In this panel, we apply LSI methodologies to the death and dying process to show the social and discursive construction of distinct cultural and social move/ments.
Paper Session Rationale Death and the dying process are important, but under-examined social processes. Since the 1960s, death-and-dying social move/ments have occupied a range of positions from within biomedicine as well as located outside of biomedical organization around ethical, relational, and spiritual communities of practice. For example, while the hospice movement was started in the early 1960s, hospice was expanded and institutionalized within hospitals and biomedical practice in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Similarly, palliative care, advance care planning, and medical aid in dying are similarly rooted in biomedical institutions authorized in professional medical authority, even when these move/ments critique biomedicine from the inside. However, other social movements located outside of the biomedical sphere are organized around ethical, relational, and spiritual communities. Dying at home was common before the pre-20th century when death was institutionalized as a primarily medical problem. Other movements including the “good death” movement, death doulas or end-of-life companions, and green burial or the eco-death move/ments are all located outside of the biomedical realm.
Language and Social Interaction (LSI) research has a long history with death and dying. David Sudnow’s classic ethnomethodological study Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying (1967) documented inequalities in the process of dying. Observing health care staff, Sudnow argued that resuscitation efforts were given based on the perceived value of the patient’s social status where perceived lower status individuals were likely to have less aggressive resuscitation than perceived higher status individuals. Later, Harvey Sacks’ and Harold Garfinkel’s work at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide (1963-1964) culminated in early Conversation Analytic research on suicide hotlines (Sacks, 1995). Specific insights from these calls ultimately revealed more general organizations of how telephone calls worked in social interaction. More recently, LSI scholars have maintained interest in death and dying. Kitzinger & Kitzinger (2014) explored the experiences of caregivers of family members in a permanent ‘vegetative state’. The caregivers describe this as an in-between, liminal state where the family member is not medically deceased but is not able to socially interact and shows how those caregivers understand the condition and their relationship with their family member. The work explores the grief accompanied through the process of caregiving for someone who is “present but absent” (p. 240). Kevoe-Feldman (2019) offered a review of how emergency calls were conducted over the prior 30 years focusing on how institutional roles are established and done in these calls, many dealing with suicidality and life-threatening emergencies. Land and Pino (2025) found that patients in hospice care made allusions to End of Life during consultations not explicitly focused on that aspect of care and healthcare providers had an opportunity in those moments to stepwise discuss death and dying in their consultations. Tate (2022) found that despite policy changes after the Affordable Care Act was instituted, doctors were still hesitant to have discussions about transitioning stage IV cancer patients into hospice and palliative care, showing that physicians orient to the treatment imperative. In her paper, Autoethnographic conversations with my dying sister, Carolyn Ellis (2024) gives readers an intimate look into her relationship with her sister throughout her sister’s end of life care, showing “[…] how terminally ill people and the caregivers who love them might think about and do the last stages of life” (p.367).
Building on this trajectory, this panel seeks to extend LSI investigation into death and dying as socially constructed discursive process. This includes but is not limited to Conversation Analysis, Ethnomethodology, Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Ethnography, and Auto-Ethnography. We are especially interested in research that does not primarily occur in a medical setting, but we do welcome papers in the biomedical domain.
Thank you for your time and consideration for submitting to this panel! When you would like to submit, or when you have questions, please email Bryanna Hebenstreit at bhebenstreit@albany.edu with your paper proposal including title, 300 word abstract, and presenter names and affiliations by March 13th, 2026 at 11:59pm PST.
Sincerely, Bryanna Hebenstreit, M.A./M.S. (Session Chair) and Christopher J. Koenig, PhD. (Respondent)
References
Ellis, C. (2024). Autoethnographic Conversations with my Dying Sister. Women & Language, 47(2), 367–380. https://doi-org.libproxy.albany.edu/10.34036/WL.2024.026
Kevoe-Feldman, H. (2019). Inside the Emergency Service Call-Center: Reviewing Thirty Years of Language and Social Interaction Research. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 52(3), 227–240. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2019.1631038
Kitzinger, Celia & Kitzinger, Jenny. (2014) “This in-between: How families talk about death in relation to severe brain injury and disorders of consciousness” in The Social Construction of Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (L. van Brussel & N Carpentier, eds), p. 239-258. https://cdoc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Kitzinger-This-In-Between_ch12-copy.pdf
Land, V., & Pino, M. (2025). Patient cues about end-of-life matters: An observational study of palliative care consultations using conversation analysis. Patient Education and Counseling, 139, Article 109243. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2025.109243
Parry, R. (2024). Communication in Palliative Care and About End of Life: A State-of-the-Art Literature Review of Conversation-Analytic Research in Healthcare. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 57(1), 127–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2024.2305048
Sacks, H. (1995). Lectures on conversation (G. Jefferson, Ed.). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Sudnow.(1967). Passing On: The Social Organziation of Dying. Prentice Hall.
Tate, A. (2022). Death and the treatment imperative: Decision-making in late-stage cancer. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 306, Article 115129. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115129
Wu, Y., & Zhang, X. (2024). Examining Conversation Analysis in Palliative Care: A Systematic Review. Health Communication, 39(13), 3072–3083. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2301202
