Geographies of Death and Dying: Rethinking Deathscapes as Sites of Resistance
Sessions - Calls for Participants
Session Title: Geographies of Death and Dying: Rethinking Deathscapes as Sites of Resistance
Session Description: Emerging scholarship on deathscapes encourages geographers to further consider the relationship between space/place and death, dying, and bereavement. From the microgeographies of the dying and bereaved, to global and geopolitical dynamics, deathscapes provide myriad opportunities for exploring multi-scalar and nuanced considerations of life/death. In a recent issue of Social and Cultural Geography, a Special Section titled “Geographies of Death and Dying” highlights the possibilities for “enlivening and politicizing” geographies of death/dying and urges scholars to critically examine death’s socio-political aspects while also carefully attending to questions of embodiment and affect (Stevenson, Kenten, & Maddrell, 2016).
This session seeks to respond to this year’s conference theme of “resistance,” by also engaging the call to consider the political and emotional dimensions of deathscapes. Deathscapes are noted as sites of contestation, where socio-cultural, political, and ethical negotiations take place (Stevenson, Kenten, & Maddrell, 2016). How might they also be understood as sites of resistance? How might examining the spatio-temporal dimensions of death contribute to understanding complexly political and emotional spaces? How is death imbricated in intersectional identities and subjectivities?
This session invites proposals exploring themes related (but not limited) to: - Death, dying, mourning and resistance
- Rethinking end of life care
- Interventions and disruptions in death care industries
- Social determinants of dying and death
- Deathscapes through an intersectional lens
- Embodiment and affective experiences in deathscapes
- Memorialising and resistance
- The right to die
- Necropolitics
- Necromobilities
- Migration, dying and death
- Negotiating death and mourning in diaspora
- Exploring liminality and questioning life/death
- Querying agency in end of life and palliative care
- Challenges to temporalities of grieving
- Environmental considerations and death
- Intersubjectivities - the living, dying, and dead
If you wish to participate in this session, please contact Jennica Giesbrecht (jg09qm@brocku.ca) with an abstract and tentative title by February 25, 2019.
This session is sponsored by CWAG.
Work Cited
Stevenson, O., Kenten, C., & Maddrell, A. (2016). And now the end is near: Enlivening and politizising the geographies of dying, death and mourning. Social & Cultural Geography, 17(2), 153-165.