Speaking & Workshops
Where the sociological
and the human meet
Conversations about death are often focused on the clinical or the emotional. My talks and workshops bridge that gap by using storytelling and social analysis to draw out the most human aspects of facing our mortality. I speak to senior living communities, hospice and palliative care teams, healthcare professionals, social workers, funeral directors, nurses, and anyone else navigating the terrain where life meets death. My talks combine academic rigor with personal narrative — grounded in 25 years of teaching sociology, direct doula practice, and the lived experience documented in Bound.
“The Conversations We Keep Putting Off”
An interactive workshop on end-of-life wishes, legacy, and what we want people to know
Most of us know we should talk about death, and all the stuff that goes with it: from advance directives and wills, to how we want our lives to be remembered and what lessons or messages we want to leave behind. And we know these are conversations we need to have more than once, with our families, our doctors, ourselves. Still, most of us don’t. Not because we’re afraid of dying, but because we don’t know how to start, or we worry about burdening the people we love. This workshop gives residents a structured, low-stakes space to explore the conversations that matter most: What kind of end do I want? What do I want people to know about me? What am I still carrying that I’d like to put down? Drawing on sociology, storytelling, and direct doula experience, I lead participants through reflection exercises, small-group sharing, and practical tools for beginning — or deepening — these conversations.
“Your Story, Your Terms”
A legacy storytelling workshop for people who want to be remembered as they truly are
Each of us has lived a life worth recording. This workshop is an invitation to do exactly that — not as a formal memoir project, but as a personal act of reclamation. What are the stories only you can tell? What do you want your children, grandchildren, or friends to understand about who you really were? I guide participants through the craft and courage of personal narrative. Participants leave with a framework for capturing their own stories and, often, a draft of something they didn’t know they were ready to write.
“Death Literacy for Care Workers”
Building comfort, language, and confidence for end-of-life conversations
Those who work in hospices, nursing homes, and other senior living settings are among the most death-adjacent people in our society, and often their training does not delve deeply enough into developing the emotional and communicative tools the work requires. This training builds what researchers call “death literacy”: the knowledge, language, and personal readiness to engage meaningfully with residents and families around dying, grief, and end-of-life wishes. The session includes real-scenario practice, discussion of organizational culture around death, and practical language tools participants can use immediately.
“Holding the Hard Stuff”
Organizational culture and the weight of end-of-life work
Staff in senior living and hospice environments carry a particular kind of weight — one that often goes unnamed and unaddressed. Compassion fatigue, grief accumulation, and cultures of stoicism take a real toll. This workshop takes a sociological approach to understanding how organizations either support or inadvertently undermine the people doing end-of-life work. I work with teams to name what they’re carrying, examine the cultural patterns that make this work harder than it needs to be, and identify practical ways to build more sustainable, humane workplace cultures.
“Shaping Our Relationship With Death Before It Shapes Our Practice”
A professional orientation for incoming fellows and clinicians entering sustained end-of-life work
Starting a career in palliative care means beginning a sustained, close relationship with death — one that most professional training doesn’t prepare you for directly. This session offers what that training rarely provides: a framework for developing your own conscious relationship with mortality before the work shapes it for you by default.
Drawing on sociology, doula practice, and the core insight of my memoir Bound — that practitioners who have genuinely reckoned with their own finitude show up differently at the bedside — I lead incoming fellows through structured reflection on how their personal relationship to death shapes the care they give. This isn’t burnout prevention training, and it isn’t therapy. It’s a professional orientation toward the thing you’re about to spend your career doing. The practitioners who do this work best tend to be the ones who arrived at it intentionally.
“The Sociology of the Good Death”
How social structures, power, and inequality shape end-of-life experience — and what practitioners can do about it
A “good death” is not equally available to everyone. Race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, and institutional power all shape who gets to die on their own terms — and who doesn’t. This talk brings a sociological lens to the end-of-life experiences that practitioners encounter every day, offering a framework for understanding why some deaths feel more humane than others, and what front-line professionals can do to shift those dynamics within their sphere of influence. Grounded in research, doula practice, and personal narrative, it is intellectually rigorous without being academic — and practically useful without being reductive. Participants leave with a richer understanding of the social forces shaping their clients’ experiences and a renewed sense of professional purpose.
“What the Dying Teach Us”
Lessons from the bedside for professional practice
What do we learn about living from being present at the end of life? This keynote weaves together my experience as a death doula, a sociologist of gender and relationships, and the author of Bound — a memoir about accompanying my mother through a final chapter that defied every conventional expectation. The talk offers practitioners a rare gift: a moment to step back from the procedural demands of their work and reconnect with its deeper meaning. It explores themes of agency, dignity, and the particular kind of intimacy that end-of-life care makes possible — and invites practitioners to reflect on how their own relationship to death and dying shapes the care they give.
To request a speaker packet, sample materials, or a brief introductory call, get in touch.
Every situation is different — if you’re not sure whether what you need is something I offer, reach out anyway.
Elizabeth Anne Wood, Ph.D. 