Las Vegas City Wire

Students in a University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) class are exploring why death is so fascinating, yet taboo.

Sheila Bock is a folklorist and assistant professor of interdisciplinary, gender, and ethnic studies at UNLV, according to a news release from the university. She teaches a course called Expressive Culture of Death.

"I decided to put a class together on this topic after attending a virtual death café at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in October 2020, where my folklorist colleagues shared their research and personal reflections at the intersections of folklore and death," Bock said in the news release. "Listening to the insights of my colleagues helped me find useful frameworks to make sense of my own heightened attention to the topic of death amidst the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and other events happening in the U.S. and world. Immediately after that event, the syllabus for the Expressive Culture of Death class started to take shape in my mind."

The class is designed for undergraduate students in the Honors College, the news release noted. Students examine a broad range of subjects including true crime podcasts, death-inspired humor, dark tourism, and beliefs and stories about the dead. Bock leads discussions on ways in which death has historically and currently "permeated pop culture, the news, politics, and personal beliefs and practices."

"In the class ... we dedicate a good deal of time to examining how the living respond to the invisibility of deaths deemed less 'grievable,' crafting visibility and remembrance through expressive forms such as street art, informal memorials, and more organized collaborative projects like the AIDS Memorial Quilt," Bock said.