About
Who we are
The Mortality Collective was formed in 2022 as a reading, writing, and discussion group that recognised the significance of mortality for a life well lived. Wanting to explore this terrain further, we came together with the aim of developing a method for engaging with the transformative potential of mortality that could unfold its promise both individually and collectively, beginning with the academic workplace. Each of us brings different scholarly training and lived experience to this project, as well as a commitment to social change, expressed in a diversity of styles and contexts. Members of the Mortality Collective include Julia Brassolotto, Albert Banerjee, and Mathura “Temwa” Mahendren.
The Mortality Collective
Albert Banerjee
I am a Research Chair in Community Health and Aging and Associate Professor in Gerontology at St. Thomas University. I have both a personal and professional interest in mortality, coming to the topic somewhat accidentally. As a disgruntled teenager, I turned to the existentialists to learn about life, meaning, and purpose. I was surprised to learn that they believed confronting mortality to be a pathway into living a life that was truly your own. Ever since I have been dancing with death, working in hospice palliative care, in nursing homes, reading, studying, chatting about being mortal and all the ways and with all the feelings this can open up – into love and the spiritual to sadness and bittersweet elixirs. I try and bring that dance into my work and that work bleeds into my life, with all the struggles such blurry (false?) boundaries entails.
Julia Brassolotto
I am a Mortal Method apprentice and an Associate Professor in Public Health at the University of Lethbridge. My research focuses broadly on aging (rural long-term care; sexual expression in continuing care homes) and dying (medical assistance in dying; ‘death-friendly’ communities). I’ve been curious about mortality (expressed in a variety of ways) since a young age. I am drawn to the works of academics, writers, poets, performers, and others who tell moving stories about what it means to be mortal and engage with questions of how to live knowing that we will die.
Mathura Mahendren
I am a storyteller by nature, and design researcher by nurture. My practice is rooted in a commitment to designing and sharing tools, frameworks, and brave spaces that can hold individuals, groups, and relationships through difference, discomfort, grief, change, and ultimately, growth. Recognizing that our ability to move through these experiences is intertwined with how and how deeply we were taught to love, love is both the method and the madness that underpins all of my bodies of work. I am the author of the toolkit and audiobook Dismantling the Master’s Tools: A Somatic Approach to Interrogating White Supremacy.
