Death, dying, and the ethics of care - with Iris Parra Jounou

What can care ethics contribute to a better understanding of death, dying, and end-of-life care? What would a relational approach to assisted dying look like? And how should care be incorporated into public policy by local and national governments?

These are some of the questions we explore in this episode, in conversation with Iris Parra Jounou. Iris is a researcher in care ethics and political philosophy, specialising in end-of-life care. She is an assistant professor in philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in Catalonia, Spain, where she was awarded a PhD in 2025 for her thesis entitled ‘Dying in the Relaissance: End-of-Life Practices in a Caring Democracy’. Iris previously studied for bachelor’s degrees in both nursing and humanities, and for a Masters degree in contemporary thought and classical tradition. She is also a published poet and a musician.

Iris has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on end-of-life care and assisted dying, and she also has the distinction of having translated key works by the leading American care ethicist Joan Tronto into Catalan. She a contributed a chapter on ‘a care ethics and aesthetics approach to stillbirth and late termination of pregnancy for foetal anomalies’ in the recently-published edited collection Care Aesthetics and the Arts. Iris has edited a new volume on Care Ethics and Public Health, which has been published, in the Peeters Ethics of Care series, since we recorded the episode.

We discuss the following topics in this episode:

Iris' personal and professional journey to studying the philosophy of care (02:35)

Witnessing death and developing an interest in end-of-life care (06:24)

Iris' introduction to feminist care ethics (10:55)

How Iris came to interview Joan Tronto and translate her books into Catalan (16:22)

A brief cultural history of death and dying (19:57)

Towards 'an expressive-collaborative model of mortality' using care ethics (24:42)

'Dying in the relaissance' (27:46)

A relational approach to assisted dying (30:30)

The ethical conflicts of implementing medical assistance in dying (34:34)

Towards a patient-centred definition of unbearable suffering (39:05)

Iris' forthcoming co-edited book on care ethics and public health (44:10)