Gaudenz Metzger (University of Manchester). Life in Limbo: Hospice care, photography, and the performance of the everyday
| Dates: | 24 November 2025 |
|---|
| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
|---|
| What is it: | Seminar |
|---|
| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
|---|
| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
|---|
| Speaker: | Gaudenz Metzger |
|---|
|
Modern Western societies have struggled to find appropriate ways of dealing with the existential situation of dying and death. Under the influence of biomedicine, rationalisation, and secularisation, death has increasingly been framed as a medical problem, stripping it of its social and spiritual dimensions. Frequently observed effects of the medicalisation and sequestration of death from society are the dehumanisation, isolation, and loneliness of the dying. In conscious response to these societal ills, the British nurse and doctor Dame Cicely Saunders founded St Christopher’s Hospice in London 1967, which sought more humane ways to care for terminally ill people. A stunning record of these efforts can be found in an extensive archive of photographs commissioned by Saunders in the 1970s and 1980s, documenting patients, nursing care, and social activities at St Christopher’s. This paper shares insights into an ongoing multimodal ethnography in which parts of the archive have been digitised to enable the current hospice community to engage with their history and experiences of the place. It explores how historical photographs and archives can be re-appropriated, re-narrated, and performed in the ‘here and now’ to deepen our understanding of hospice care and life in the vicinity of death.
Dr Gaudenz Metzger is a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, The University of Manchester. As a transdisciplinary researcher, he examines the intersections of visual culture, Western care philosophies, and death. His current project is a multimodal anthropology in partnership with St Christopher's Hospice in London that explores the history and evolution of the hospice movement through image archives, visual methods, and performing arts.
Speaker
Gaudenz Metzger
Organisation: University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Boardroom (2.016-17)
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
