It is a shared experience across the world to encounter the embodied death of someone significant in our lives or communities. Such experiences engage with the deepest spiritual and religious questions and diverse ways of being in the world. Across traditions, practices of mourning have helped people find meaning in loss and reaffirm bonds of community. How we grapple with death is not only a private matter but also embedded in the communities and institutions that surround us.
This Berkley Forum asks: How do rituals of mourning help individuals and communities after a death? How does “grief” reshape self-concepts, including that in relation to God, the sacred, and religious beliefs? How do race, gender, legacies of colonialism, and continuing inequalities of power determine who is grievable and who is permitted to grieve publicly, with what social supports, and how religion is involved? And, how can and do communities transform grief into political action, from feminist movements to struggles for civil rights?
Response: Political Funerals
Deborah Streahle
April 22, 2026
Response: The Good Death
Becky Yang Hsu
April 22, 2026
Response: The Political Language of Grief
Jane McCarthy
Lystra Dickinson
Korina Giaxoglou
April 22, 2026
Response: The Songs They Sing for the Dead: On Taking Flight with Sufjan Stevens and W.E.B. Du Bois
Freeden Blume Oeur
April 22, 2026
Response: Why Decolonizing the Study of Death Matters
Ara Francis
Jyoti Puri
April 22, 2026
Becky Yang Hsu is an associate professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University, where she is also affiliated with the Asian Studies Program and the Graduate School's M.S. in Health and the Public Interest Program. She is directing a research group on the topic of Culture and Society as part of the Georgetown University Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues. She is the author of Borrowing Together: Microfinance and Cultivating Social Ties (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and co-editor, with Richard Madsen, of The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life (University of California Press, 2019); Hsu is currently completing a single-authored book, Serenity: Happiness and Death in China (University of Chicago Press), which focuses on family, bereavement, and well-being. She was project leader (PI) of a John Templeton Foundation funded project, "The Concept of Fu in Contemporary China: Searching for Well-Being, Purpose, and the Good Life" (2013-2016). The Washington Post featured two videos from her fieldwork (“What people around the world mean when they say they’re happy,” February 3, 2016). She is on the editorial boards of two journals, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Social Science and Medicine—Mental Health. She holds a B.A. from Yale University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University.
