News
Ph.D. student Katrine B. Komischke-Konnerup wins the Ministry of Education and Research's Elite Research travel scholarship 2024.
The Ministry of Education and Research's Elite Research travel scholarship is awarded annually to some of the most talented Ph.D. students in the country. On February 26th, Katrine B. Komischke-Konnerup, a Ph.D. student at the Unit for Bereavement Research, was awarded a travel scholarship, which provides her with the opportunity to travel to the University of Queensland and the University of New South Wales in Australia to visit the world's leading researchers in trauma and grief.
Read more here about Katrine, her Ph.D. project, and her plans in Australia.
November 15, Unit for Bereavement Research were proud to present a public talk on "phenomenological interpretations of how emotions modify temporal, spatial and bodily experience - the ambiguity of bodily experience of grief".
Abstract: Recent work in the philosophy of emotion has emphasised the idea that grief has a two-sided structure. A process of loss that unfolds unevenly over time, grief is oriented towards the death of a particular person, yet can at the same time be all-encompassing, disrupting one’s entire world in a sustained way. This paper aims to clarify this two-sided structure by focusing on the ambiguity of bodily experience in grief in particular. Drawing on survey responses to the question ‘Has your body felt any different during grief?’ collected with colleagues as part of the ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience’ project at the University of York, this paper will analyse bodily feelings such as ‘heaviness,’ ‘numbness,’ ‘emptiness,’ ‘hollowness,’ and ‘disembodiment,’ in order to help illuminate what is lost in grief, and how it is that this loss can be both so specific and so diffuse.
Bio: Emily Hughes is a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.’ She completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales. Her research is situated in the intersection between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, with a particular focus on phenomenological interpretations of affect and the way in which emotions modify temporal, spatial and bodily experience. |
The inauguration of The National Grief Center in Vejle
The National Grief Center inaugurated a new center in the heart of Vejle on Tuesday, August 22, 2023.
The Unit for Bereavement Research and The National Grief Center have a close collaboration, which is why Professor and Head of the Unit for Bereavement Research, Maja O'Connor, participated in the inauguration. Maja O'Connor also presented the unit's work with the elderly and grief.
Crown Princess Mary, who is the patron of The National Grief Center, also attended the opening ceremony and showed great interest in the unit's research projects and work regarding grief.
First European Grief Conference
In September 2022, the first European conference on grief was held in Copenhagen. The conference was organized by the National Center for Grief in collaboration with the Bereavement Network Europe (BNE), Aarhus University, and the Irish Hospice Foundation. This was the first in a series of grief conferences. The next one, the Second European Grief Conference, will be held in Ireland in 2024.
The purpose was to share knowledge about grief and promote grief care in Europe by inspiring collaboration.
Professor and head of the Unit for Bereavement Research, Maja O'Connor, was part of the conference planning committee, where she also gave a lecture on the Grief Scale Study.
From the Unit for Bereavement Research, Lene Larsen also participated with a presentation on "My Experience of Grief: A Study of Grief Processes," and Katrine B. Komischke-Konnerup gave a presentation on "Life with Grief." Find all the unit's projects here.
A former participant from the TAB Study, Per Lykke Jacobsen, participated by reciting his own poems. The poems are a poetic narrative about loss, grief, joy, love, and the feeling of powerlessness in the face of death. You can read the poems here. The conference also featured the artwork "SORG" created by artist Britt Boesen based on testimonies from bereaved individuals. See them here.
You can also learn more about the conference on the official website: https://www.egc2022.dk/
The Danish Science Festival on the 28th of April, 2022
Unit for Bereavement Research participated in The Danish Science Festival on Thursday the 28th of April, 2022.
We spoke about grief and our research projects at the unit and had at lot of exciting conversations with the visitors. This included asking the audience what grief means to them which led to an exciting mind map of what grief can entail (see image below). Thanks to the visitors for their contributions.
