Grief as Communion

Honouring Collective Grief Through a Black Feminist Ethic of Care

Authors

Abstract

 

 

Author Biography

  • Crystal-Jade Cargill Cargill, University of Waterloo

    Crystal-Jade Cargill is a PhD student in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her research seeks to understand the impact of grief, bereavement, and loss on the health and wellbeing of healthcare workers in Long-Term Care Homes (LTCHs).

References

Ahmed, S. (2004). “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22(9):117–139. doi-org.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.1215/01642472-22-2_79-117

APA (American Psychological Association). 2022. “Prolonged Grief Disorder.” www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/prolonged-grief-disorder

Breen, L.J., Kawashima, D., Joy, K., Cadell, S., Roth, D., Chow, A., Macdonald, M.E. 2020. “Grief Literacy: A Call to Action for Compassionate Communities.” Death Studies 46(2): 425–433 doi:10.1080/07481187.2020.1739780

Cadell, S. 2022. “Grief and Loss: A Shifting Landscape.” In Trauma, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth in Clinical Social Work Practice edited by H.M. Boynton, J.A. Vis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Collins, P.H. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge. doi-org.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.4324/9780203900055

Cunsolo, A., and Ellis, N.R. 2018. “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change-related Loss.” Nature Climate Change 8(4): 275–281. doi-org.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2

Frommer, M.S. 2019. “Grieve with Me: Discussion of “Who Has the Right to Mourn?: Relational Deference and the Ranking of Grief.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 29:493–500.

Gouws, A., and van Zyl. 2015. “Towards a Feminist Ethics of Ubuntu: Bridging Rights and Ubuntu.” In Care Ethics and Political Theory edited by D. Engster and M. Hammington. Oxford University Press.

Harris, D. 2009. “Oppression of the Bereaved: A Critical Analysis of Grief in Western Society.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying 60(3):241–253. doi: 10.2190/OM.60.3.

hooks, b. 2001. all about love: New Visions. Harper Collins

Horwitz, A.V. 2019. “The Medicalization of Grief.” In Exploring Grief: Towards a Sociology of Sorrow edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Anders Petersen. Routledge. doi-org.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.4324/9780429201301

Jacobsen, M.H., and Petersen, A. 2019. “Grief in an Individualized Society.” In Exploring Grief: Towards a Sociology of Sorrow edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Anders Petersen. Routledge. doi-org.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.4324/9780429201301

Macdonald, M.E. 2019. “The Denial of Grief: Reflections from a Decade of Anthropological Research on Parental Bereavement and Child Death.” In Exploring Grief: Towards a Sociology of Sorrow edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Anders Petersen. Routledge. doi-org.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.4324/9780429201301

Matthew, L.E. 2021. “Braiding Western and Eastern Cultural Rituals in Bereavement: An Autoethnography of Healing the Pain of Prolonged Grief.” British Journal of Guidance and Counselling 49(6): 791-803. doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2021.1983158

Nash, J.C. 2020. “Practicing Love.” Meridians 19:439-462. doi-org.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.1215/15366936-8566089

Neimeyer, R.A., Klass, D., Dennis, M.R. 2014. “A Social Constructionist Account of Grief: Loss and the Narration of Meaning.” Death Studies 38: 485-498. doi: 10.1080/07481187.2014.913454

Downloads

Published

2026-04-29

Issue

Vol. 47 No. 1 (2026): “Healing is an Act of Communion”: Critical Perspectives on Women’s Health, Wellness, and Disease

Section

Reflections and Commentary

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Crystal-Jade Cargill Cargill

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

2. Authors are aware that articles published in Atlantis are indexed and made available through various scholarly and professional search tools, including but not limited to Erudit.

3. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

4. Authors are permitted and encouraged to preprint their work, that is, post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process. This can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Read more on preprints here.