CRDS is the radical shift Death Studies needs and thereby serves as a source of knowledge for how death practitioners, death care professionals, students and scholars alike can all better understand deathways of people of color and marginalized groups.

Who Are We?  We are a collective of Scholars, Funeral Directors, Death Work Practitioners, Activists, and Students of Death Studies who view death work as synonymous with anti-racism work, synonymous with actively dismantling oppression, and as a way to validate cultural and social life among marginalized groups.  We are working to achieve the goals of decolonizing death studies in theory and in practice from a variety of angles.

What Is Our Mission?  Our mission is to interrogate the field of Death Studies to decolonize and de-center whiteness while calling to radicalize death practices, all in theory and in practice from a variety of angles, i.e. our research, writing, community work, and professional careers.

What Are Our Goals? 

1. To create a Radical Death Canon that can be adapted as a tool by death educators, death scholars, death practitioners, and all those interested in understanding death, dying, and the rituals of care provided from a decolonized perspective.

2. To increase diversity in death scholarship and conversations–beyond class analysis

3. Working to analyze how death, mourning, burial, and death investigations have changed over time along the lines of race, class, gender, ability/disability, sexuality

4. To serve as a resource for a discerned understanding of the end-of-life experience and rituals around death for marginalized people and their communities