Bureaucracy at the Bedside: Presenting at the CDAS Conference 2026

My work has always lived at the intersection of grief, death, care, and the systems that surround them. So I’m pleased to be presenting a paper at this year’s Centre for Death and Society (CDAS) Conference at the University of Bath.

The paper is titled Bureaucracy at the bedside: institutional power, end-of-life companionship, and the afterlife of paperwork.

End-of-life care and bereavement are often imagined as deeply personal, relational experiences. In reality, they are also shaped, sometimes quietly, sometimes forcefully, by institutions: hospitals, hospices, charities, and the administrative systems that sit around them.

In this paper, I explore three everyday sites where institutional power shows up at the bedside and then travels into mourning:

• Access — who gets support, when, and on what terms

• Language — how forms, paperwork, and professional talk shape what can and cannot be said

• Temporality — how organisational pace often clashes with the slower, human pace of dying, caring, and grieving

I also look at how social location, culture, and literacy influence who can navigate these systems with relative ease and who is left carrying additional distress.

Rather than arguing against institutions, the paper considers how small, thoughtful shifts in language, pacing, and relational practice can help restore dignity and agency in the middle of profound loss.

This work grows out of my counselling practice, my volunteering as an end-of-life companion, and a wider interest in how people maintain dignity within the systems that accompany illness, dying, and bereavement.

If you’re interested in these themes, the full conference handbook is available here:
https://www.bath.ac.uk/publications/centre-for-death-and-societys-2026-conference-handbook/attachments/cdas-conference-handbook-2026.pdf

I’m looking forward to the conversations this year’s conference will bring.