Biography
Professor Ara Francis is a microsociologist whose current scholarship focuses on the history of the death positive movement and the hospice care model. She is particularly interested in the relationship between white femininity and taken-for-granted ideas about what it means to die well. Her first book, Family Troubles: Middle-Class Parents, Children's Problems, and the Disruption of Everyday Life (2015, Rutgers University Press), examined middle-class parents’ experiences of raising children who had been marked as different, disabled, or deviant. She teaches courses on death and dying, normalcy and social control, self and society, and the sociological perspective.
Selected Publications
“The Politics of Death Positivity: A Critical History of Cicely Saunders and the Hospice Model of Care” (2025, Critical Sociology, Special Issue on Death and Dying)
“The Staying Power of Analytical Distance: Lyn Lofland’s Contributions to the Sociology of Death, Dying, and Bereavement” (2025, Symbolic Interaction, Special Issue on Lyn Lofland’s Intellectual Legacy 48(2): 224-240)
“Critical Approaches to Death Studies: A Conversation,” with K. Fletcher and P. Maxwell (2025, Mortality, Special Issue on Innovation 30(2): 569–584)
“Gender and Legitimacy in Personal Service Occupations: The Case of End-of-Life Doulas and Death Midwives” (2022, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 51(3): 376-406)
“Epilogue” in Lyn Lofland’s The Craft of Dying: The Modern Face of Death, 40th Anniversary Edition (MIT Press, 2019)