Repairing estranged death: Care, politics and ecology in the US funeral industry

Author

• Cecilia Catherine RodriguezFollow

Graduation Date

Spring 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Program

Master of Arts degree with a major in Social Science, Environment and Community

Committee Chair Name

Gabi Kirk

Committee Chair Affiliation

Cal Poly Humboldt Faculty or Staff

Second Committee Member Name

Sarah Ray

Second Committee Member Affiliation

Community Member or Outside Professional

Third Committee Member Name

Robert McGehee

Keywords

Necropolitics, Death care, Feminist political ecology, Funeral industry, Capitalism, Death workers, Death practice

Subject Categories

Environment and Community

Abstract

The industrialization of death practices in the US has separated humanity from natural cycles while centering white settler colonial norms that marginalize other cultural ways of caring for the dead. Through necropolitics, the contemporary death industry embodies capitalist values of commodification and a monopolization of care, separating death from community and its ecological cycles. Black and Indigenous feminist knowledges understand death as not a discrete event but instead as an ongoing process that shapes our relationships with both the human and more-than-human worlds. Engaging with feminist political ecologies, I extend a conversation about care and repair to contemporary death practices in the funeral industry, where ecological entanglements, care, and power converge. Through semi-structured interviews, historical analysis, and participant observation, I examine how death professionals interact with the dead and their bereaved, shaping ecological and cultural relationships with death. This thesis asks: How do death workers understand their role in shaping cultural relationships with death? What can that reveal about the ecological and political dimensions of US death practices? How do death workers within the US death industry embody, resist, or repair industrialized and ecologically estranged approaches to death care? It argues that white settler colonialism and capitalism have shaped the funeral ii industry and its regulatory structures that constrain death workers’ knowledge and practices. Death workers express these constraints through the embodiment of, resistance to, and repair of the industrialization of death work. Reimagining and repairing the practice of caring for the dead may offer renewed ecological and communal connectedness.

Recommended Citation

Rodriguez, Cecilia Catherine, "Repairing estranged death: Care, politics and ecology in the US funeral industry" (2026). Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects. 2560.
https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/etd/2560