How did we get here?
After sharing a long, difficult and vulnerable conversation together in October 2021, Rachel Maloney and Dr. Dan Vena began their partnership in developing this grief, death and dying resource for the Queen’s community. Rachel had been informed about the death of a distant acquaintance and was struggling to reconcile her spiraling thoughts and heavy feelings, unsure how to process the loss of someone so close in age especially. But Dr. Vena offered Rachel the opportunity to discuss her feelings and anxieties around death and helped her begin to remould her relationship to life and loss.
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Shortly after, the two began discussing their own ideas around implementing programs, resources and events on the Queen’s campus to offer grief support, death education and an introduction to death positivity. This especially spoke to the interests of Dr. Vena, who is well versed in the academic and practical world of death studies, and frequently ties this area of interest to his work in the Film & Media department (see here). Rachel and Dr. Vena poured all their thoughts and goals into writing and successfully obtained funding from the Undergraduate Student Summer Research Fellowship (USSRF) from Queen’s University, with additional funding and unwavering support from The Witch Institute.
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Rachel spent the following months researching and learning as much as she could about the world of death studies by reading various novels, memoirs, research papers, news articles and more, with Dr. Dan Vena as her insightful and spirited supervisor. Upon gaining a solid foundation in this field and acquiring a plethora of ideas she began to put all her learning into digestible sections for this online resource, aimed specifically at aiding the university student.
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Rachel and Dr. Vena plan to continue their collaboration by adding more information to this resource and supplementing these words with activities and events on campus in the near future. Rachel will also be presenting her findings and conclusions from the process of developing this resource for the USSRF in the late fall of 2022. Additionally, Rachel and Dr. Vena will be participating in the Lifting the Lid Festival from November 18-20, 2022, to discuss topics related to death positivity.
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DISCLAIMER:
No one affiliated with the creation of this resource is a licensed therapist. The aim of this project is to provide assistance and guidance to our community, which may include the advice to seek out a therapist or grief counselor, both of which are highly qualified and specialized for the purpose of providing specific and intimate care. Our primary goal is to help promote public interest research into the topics of death, dying and grief.
Who are we?
Rachel Maloney
She/her
Rachel is a fourth-year student at Queen’s University pursuing a Life Sciences major and studying Film & Media as her minor. She is heavily involved within the Queen’s community, holding the position of Co-Chair on Queen’s Sustainability Conference (QSUS) and the Student Outreach Coordinator in Queen’s Social Impact Association (QSIA). After receiving funding and finalizing her research for the USSRF, Rachel is expanding upon her work on the Conversations with Death resource by completing a Directed Studies placement with Dr. Dan Vena. She hopes to introduce students to more topics under the umbrella of death education through her resource and on-campus events and to continue researching and developing death studies in the world of academia far into the future.
Dan Vena
He/him
Dan is a queer-trans white settler of Italian descent, who identifies as disabled in relation to capitalist calls towards productivity (under Eurocentric medical models, he is diagnosed with fibromyalgia/chronic pain). He is radically invested in spirituality and death positivity as part of his pedagogical practice and is committed to decolonial, anti-racist, queer-trans, disabled, anti-capitalist & neurodivergent collaborative world-making.
Madison Shields
She/her
Madison is a recent graduate of the Film and Media program at Queen's University. She has a wide array of interests within the film and media sphere, her latest endeavour being a festival position with the Toronto International Film Festival. She was brought on to the Conversations with Death resource through her work as a summer research assistant for The Witch Institute and was excited to use her graphic design skills to build this website, in doing so bringing Rachel and Dan's vision to life.