Decolonizing the Lifeworld of Death

Abstract

In our final chapter, I aim to amalgamate all important concepts provided by scholars presented in the monograph for a final reading of the Death Café’s phenomenon as a social movement. With pride of place still given to Habermas’s theory of communicative action, I also hope to show how the amalgamation of communicative action concepts underpin a death identity. In this regard, I remind readers that we are witnessing a decolonizing of the lifeworld through Death Café renderings of life and death. I note how such a decolonization through Death Cafés serve to articulate our shared humanity in an age of divisive identity politics. The closing sections of our final chapter elaborates on sociologist Anthony Giddens’s views about the catalytic aspects of social risk that propel participants toward responding to an increasingly precarious society. The desire to engage with risk calculations can be seen as a set of factors that motivate Café attendees to mitigate risks by collectively engaging in death talk. To understand their efforts as a movement, a condensed review of social movement literature is undertaken. By conducting a social movement literature review that took place during the last chapter allows the literature to function as a crescendo for the efforts of Café participants, all of whom are framed as movement activists in this work. The chapter closes on a positive note, reminding readers that the Death Café ultimately returns us to life and living.