Abstract
The chapter gives an overview of the book's chapters, organised in four parts: social construction, popular media, political and ethical dimensions, and governing death. In addition, the chapter argues for the importance of analysing death as a social construction.
This does not mean, however, that we neglect (or even worse, deny) the material dimensions of death in this chapter. Rather, the text argues that the material and the discursive are deeply intertwined, where the material refers to the materiality of the object (for instance the (dead) body), to the materiality of practices (for instance medical practices relating to death or ritual practices of mourning), as well as to the materiality of the field where death and dying are socially constructed (for instance the media field and the medical field), and where the discursive refers to the socially constructed and culturally specific meanings attached to death and dying.