PUBLICATIONS

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A full list of publications can be found on my CV

Alkaline Hydrolysis

I have written several pieces about this 'new' disposition technology:

(2014) "Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the US," Science, Technology, & Human Values 39/5
(2018) "Basic Cremation," Wake Forest Journal of Law and Policy
(2016) “Custody of the Corpse: Controlling Alkaline Hydrolysis in US Deathcare Markets," In Death in a Consumer Culture, edited by Susan Dobscha

BOOKS

(2024) Death’s Social Meaning and Materiality Beyond the Human. Death and Culture series (Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press.)

ARTICLES/CHAPTERS

(2026) "Woodthorpe, Kate, Philip Olson, Daniel Robins, Georgina Robinson, and Simon Cox. (2026). “Is Human Body Disposal an Environmental Issue?” Mortality, 31(3): 921-936.
(2024) “Death at a Planetary Scale: Mortality’s Moral Materiality in the Context of the Anthropocene.” In Death’s Social Meaning and Materiality Beyond the Human.
(2016) “Knowing Necro-Waste.” Social Epistemology 30/3: 326-345.

I have become more interested in thinking about current US death care policies and how they might be improved.

Zavattaro, S., Schuneman, C., Basmajian, C., Coutts, C., ., Webb, D. (2026). “Death Becomes a Government Capacity Issue: Big Questions for Local Government Death Management,” , 49(1-2): 30-39.
(2024) Olson, Philip R. and Lane Wilson. ”The Affordable (Death) Care Act: Radical Reformation of Federal Funeral Regulation to Address Funeral Poverty.” Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy, 59(4): 963-979.

(2018) With Christine Labuski “’There’s Always a [White] Man in the Loop’: The Gendered and Racialized Politics of Civilian Drones.” Social Studies of Science 48/4 (August): 540-563.
(2016) “Domesticating Deathcare: The Women of the U.SNatural Deathcare Movement. Journal of Medical Humanities 39/2 (June): 195-215.
(2021) With Patricia MacCormack, Marietta Radomska, Nina Lykke, Ida Hillerup Hansen, and Nick Manganas. ‘What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Queer Death?/1 Theories and Definitions’. Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies 4: 584-589.
(2022) “To Bear a Corpse: Home Funerals and Epistemic Cultures in U.S. Death Care.” In The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the 21st Century, edited by Shannon Lee Dawdy and Tamara Kneese

(2012) “Putting Knowledge in its Place: Virtue, Value and the Internalism/Externalism Debate.” Philosophical Studies 159/2 (June): 241-261.
(2012) “Recent Work in Applied Virtue Ethics. American Philosophical Quarterly 49/3 (July): 183-203.
(2015) “Epistemic Burdens and the Value of Ignorance.” In The Future of Social Epistemology: A Collective Vision, edited by James Collier.
(2013) “Combatting Racialized and Gendered Habits of Ignorance: Toward a Transactional Pedagogy of Friendship.” Feminist Formations 25/1 (Spring): 59-83.