Death Down Under

Ruth McManus is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. She researches on social aspects of death and dying, and is inaugural President of the New Zealand Society for Death Studies. Her current projects include disaster memorialisation and new technologies for body disposal.Jon Cornwall is currently the Education Advisor for the Centre for Early Learning in Medicine at Otago Medical School at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Trained originally as a physiotherapist and holding a PhD in Clinical Anatomy, his research interests are posthumous human assets including body donation, organ donation, and the utility of posthumous medical records. He is a member of the Federative International Committee for Ethics in the Medical Humanities, the committee that oversees global guideline development for bodies donated to medical science. Sally Raudon is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, focusing on citizenship, the state, the body, and death. Before commencing her PhD studies, she was a Research Fellow at the University of Auckland and a Teaching Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.