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Contact info
For Library research help, please contact Moninder Lalli, Librarian for Sociology / Anthropology by email moninder_lalli@sfu.ca or Ask a librarian.
See also the Gerontology guide on Death, Dying, and Grief.
Research process
Start Your Research Here - This page gives you an overview of the research process, or in other words how to find materials for your essay.
Selected reference works
Encyclopedias, handbooks or textbooks provide overviews, definitions and identify key authors and ideas.
- A Companion to the Anthropology of Death
- Dealing with death a handbook of practices, procedures and law
- Death and bereavement across cultures
- Handbook of thanatology : the essential body of knowledge for the study of death, dying, and bereavement
- Handbook of the sociology of death, grief, and bereavement : a guide to theory and practice
- Handbook of traumatic loss
- Helping grieving people : when tears are not enough : a handbook for care providers
- Oxford handbook of suicide and self-injury
- Oxford handbook of the philosophy of death
- Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studies
- Routledge companion to death and dying
- Routledge handbook of death and the afterlife
- Routledge international handbook of drug-related death bereavement
Databases for journal articles
How to find journal articles" tutorial.
The databases below will provide articles on information technology and society. If the full-text of the article is not available, use the "Get@SFU" link to find it. For examples of search strategies, see examples under the section, "Find books - Keyword searches for topics."
Tip: to find journal articles that provide "reviews of literature", try searching for, "literature review" OR "review" in the various databases.
Sociological / Anthropological
- ProQuest Sociology Collection - for issues related to class, gender, racism, sexuality and sexism and theoretical and applied sociology, social science, and policy science.
- Anthropology Plus - Key database for Anthropological journal articles.
- AnthroSource - Full-text access to journals produced by the American Anthropological Association
Other disciplines and news
- Ageline - the major social gerontology database. Guide: An Introduction to the Ageline database
- Bibliography of Indigenous Peoples in North America - for books, essays, journal articles, and government documents on all aspects of Indigenous culture, history, and life in North America.
- CBCA Complete Canadian scholarly journal articles, trade publications, dissertations, books, newspapers and and magazines.
- Canadian Newsstream covers the major Canadian daily newspapers
- Communication and Mass Media Complete - Important database for "popular culture" and "media" topics
- Social Sciences Full Text Multi-disciplinary database
- Film & Television Literature Index - International index to scholarly and popular journal literature on film, television and video
- IBISWorld - Analysis of over 1300 narrowly-defined US industries providing insight into current and future industry performance, changing trends, operating conditions and supply chain linkages.
- Useful for business reports on the funeral industry
- Note: Search for a complete word (boolean logic, "AND", "OR" do not work): funeral, then use the pulldown menu to restrict to "Canada" (for reports on funeral industry in Canada)
- Nexis Uni - Newspapers, journals, reports, cases, and patents from the early 1970s to the present.
Selected journals
You can also browse a major journal in the area such as:
Find books in the Library
Library Catalogue search guide
Search the SFU Library Catalogue. You can also use SFU Library Catalogue: Advanced Search
Books by title
Books can be searched by title using the "Browse by title" search, Catalogue Search or the Advanced Search. The "Browse by title" will not show book chapters or book reviews.
Keyword searches for topics
- death AND (system* OR ritual* OR custom*) AND sociolog*
- (sociolog* OR anthropolog*) AND (death OR bereav* OR dying OR grief OR griev* OR mourn*) AND theor*
- (race OR gender OR class) AND (death OR bereav* OR dying OR grief OR griev* OR mourn*)
- politic* AND (death OR dying OR bereav* OR mourn* OR griev*)
- (death OR dying) AND (child* OR parent* OR mother OR father OR friend)
- (death OR dying) AND (religi* OR faith OR church OR mosque OR temple)
- funeral home* OR funeral industry
- (death OR dying OR homicid* OR suicide*) AND (news OR media OR journalis*)
- (AI OR "artificial intelligence" OR virtual reality) AND (death OR dying OR bereav* OR mourn* OR griev*)
- ethnograph* AND (death OR dying) AND (religi* OR faith OR church OR mosque OR temple)
- (ethnograph*) AND (death OR dying OR bereave* OR grief OR greaving)
- (Indigen* OR aborig* OR "first nations") AND (death OR dying OR bereav* OR mourn* OR griev*)
- (film OR cinema OR movies OR TV OR television OR "popular culture") AND (death OR dying OR bereav* OR mourn* OR griev*)
- ("black lives matter") AND (death OR dying OR bereav* OR mourn* OR griev*)
- collective AND (memory OR memoriali*) AND (death OR dying OR bereav* OR mourn* OR griev*)
- thanatolog*
- ("end of life" OR palliativ* OR "terminally ill") AND (care OR decision)
Combine different concepts using AND
Combine same concepts using OR
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase
Use brackets for synonyms
Use asterisk (*) for different endings of words
Note: For Catalogue Search, when combining concepts, use CAPITAL letters ( "OR", "AND")
Selected books
- A public health perspective on end of life care
- AI for death and dying
- Art of Dying: 21st Century Depictions of Death and Dying
- At Home with Grief : Continued Bonds with the Deceased
- Being dead otherwise
- Creating meaning in funerals : how families and communities make sense of death
- Critical approaches to death, dying and bereavement
- Death
- Death Across Cultures: Death and Dying in Non-Western Cultures
- Death and bereavement across cultures
- Death and dying : a sociological introduction [print]
- Death and dying : sociological perspectives
- Death and dying : views from many cultures
- Death and religion in a changing world
- Death, dying, and bereavement : contemporary perspectives, institutions, and practices
- Death, dying and bereavement : new sociological perspectives
- Death in contemporary popular culture
- Death in the Early Twenty-first Century: Authority, Innovation, and Mortuary Rites
- Death, ritual, and belief : the rhetoric of funerary rites
- Day of Shelly's death : the poetry and ethnography of Grief [print]
- Death, society, and human experience [print]
- Digital afterlife : death matters in a digital age
- Dying : a social perspective on the end of life
- Dying Alone: Challenging Assumptions
- Dying : Facing the Facts
- Emotions in Digital Interactions: Ethnopsychologies of Angels' Mothers in Online Bereavement Communities
- Final Transition
- Get Your Knee off Our Necks: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter
- Grassroots memorials : the politics of memorializing traumatic death
- Grieving beyond gender : understanding diverse grieving styles
- Hospice ethics : policy and practice in palliative care
- Journey's end : an investigation of death and dying in modern America
- Learning to say goodbye : dealing with death and dying
- Managing Death: International Perspectives
- Matter of death : space, place and materiality
- Mourning in America : race and the politics of loss
- Narratives of Parental Death, Dying and Bereavement: A Kind of Haunting
- New death : mortality and death care in the twenty-first century
- Non-Shia practices of Muḥarram in South Asia and the diaspora : beyond mourning
- On (Writing) Families: Autoethnographies of Presence and Absence, Love and Loss
- Passages and afterworlds : anthropological perspectives on death in the Caribbean
- Political lives of dead bodies : reburial and postsocialist change [print]
- Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies
- Presence of the dead in our lives [print]
- Representing death in the news : journalism, media and mortality
- Social Perspectives on Death and Dying [print, 2019]
- Sorrow and solace : the social world of the cemetery
- World of Bereavement: Cultural Perspectives on Death in Families
- Writing the self in bereavement : a story of love, spousal loss, and resilience
Browse search
Choose: Browse tab, change "title" to "subject"
- Attitude to death
- Bereavement
- Death
- Death -- [geographic region or country]
- Death -- Social aspects
- Death -- Religious aspects
- Funeral rites and ceremonies
- Mourning customs
- Terminal care
Presentation skills and writing help
- Resources on developing your participation skills
- Resources to help you improve your presentation skills
Library guides
- Library Research Tutorials. Animated tutorials on search techniques for finding books and journal articles.
- Annotated bibliographies
- Evaluating sources
- How to find journal articles
- Library Catalogue search guide
- What is a scholarly (or peer-reviewed) journal?
- What is plagiarism? Guide to common forms of plagiarism and how to avoid them
Writing help
Student Learning Commons provides assistance and numerous, helpful guides.