Making Sense Workshop 5: Near Death Experiences

The Affective Experience Lab’s ‘Making Sense’ workshops bring together colleagues from across disciplines to reflect on key themes that relate to our shared interest in affect, emotion and embodiment.

In this informal seminar we will be joined by Dr Alex Fry (Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Health and Illness, Bournemouth University) to discuss recent work on near-dear experiences, and to consider possibilities for future collaborative research on this theme.

Near-death experiences are experiences associated with death or impending death. Those who have a near-death experience report substantial changes to how they find being in their bodies after a period of apparent disembodied consciousness. They also report viewing the world in a radically different way to how they did previously, in addition to experiencing alterations in how they relate to others. Such a shift in worldview has profound implications for individuals’ wellbeing—the equilibrium between challenging events and the ability to deal with them.

We will focus our discussion around the following extracts, though please don't worry if you have not had time to read them in detail:

Atwater, P. The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences: The Ultimate Guide to What Happens When we Die. IANDS, 2007 [Chapter 6]

Fox, M. Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Religion, Spirituality and the Near-death Experience. Routledge, 2003. [Chapter 1]

Davies, Douglas J. Death, Ritual, and Belief : The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites. Third edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 [Chapter 9]

Copies of the readings are available from Durham University Library or by contacting Fraser Riddell.

Note: Light lunch will be provided.

The workshop is hosted by the Affective Experience Lab, led by Corinne Saunders and Fraser Riddell.