Devaleena Das

This project rethinks grief as a site of feminist pedagogical tools, illuminating how communities teach and learn through loss. In rural Minnesota, where palliative resources are often limited, communities engage in rich informal practices, from storytelling to rituals that sustain care, resilience, and collective memory. Using photovoice with assisted living residents, family caregivers, and staff, the project examines how grief is gendered and intergenerational, tracing how it is transmitted, shared, and sometimes resisted across generations through feminized roles of care. Attending to anticipatory, ambiguous, and unrecognized grief, the research foregrounds the embodied labor of women caregivers while situating these experiences within place-based feminist analyses of rurality, resource scarcity, and community interdependence. It challenges metro-centric assumptions that shape dominant grief narratives and biomedical training. Against a Western biomedical culture that often renders grief unprofessional or private, the project positions grief as a form of shared, intergenerational knowledge. In doing so, it advances grief as a feminist pedagogical framework capable of reshaping professional formation in medical education and reimagining care in rural health contexts.