Conference Presentation: Superheroes, shepherds, and symbols

Our team was delighted to share some recent research at Dalhousie University's Medical Education Research and Innovation Showcase (MERIS) on November 6th, 2025.

Team member Paula Cameron presented a longitudinal critical discourse analysis (CDA) paper, "Superheroes, shepherds, and symbols: How medical learners talk about their role with dying patients during the clerkship/ residency transition."

Drawing on two consecutive studies, the paper tracks three key transitions in how medical learners talk about death in late medical school and early residency.

We named these three ways of framing learner roles amid death as: the superhero: a professional centred, emotionally detached approach that focuses on preventing death via biomedical expertise; the shepherd: an emotionally present approach to care as accompaniment informed by patient autonomy and comfort; and the symbol: a legal, bureacratic, and ritualistic approach to death grounded in the new clinical and administrative demands of residency.

This work was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.

You can review our presentation slides below.

Presentation_MacLeod Research Group_Death transitions_MERIS 2025.pdf

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