Miranda Tuckett is an anthropologist working on topics of death, intimacy, and aesthetics. Her PhD at The New School for Social Research focuses on care, touch, and assisted dying in the United Kingdom. From February 2021 to February 2022, Miranda was immersed in the lives and deaths of individuals who travelled from the UK to Switzerland for an assisted death. She worked, in particular, with five people, three of whom are now dead. When she started her research in February 2021, Miranda wanted to know what the effects of assisted dying would be on care itself. What, she asked, did it mean to ask doctors and loved ones to help you die? In her dissertation, she examines how new spaces and ethics of care are emerging when confronting death with assistance.

At GIDEST, Miranda will develop her ethnographic materials to explore the collaborative and narrative aspects of death and dying. In doing so, her project opens up discourse around assisted death to examine the uncertainty and ambivalence around dying. The resultant writing will therefore examine a creative attitude towards dying which cannot be reduced to a singular or necessarily coherent affective response. Alongside themes of autonomy, control, and dependency, Miranda’s work delves into ethics of care and responsibility. Her project aims to complicate our understanding of secular life and death in order to render visible the networks of care, and the subjects they form, which emerge when a person recruits doctors and loved ones to help them die.