The politics of death
Despite appearing as a universal biological event, death is and has never been neutral. Instead, it is deeply entwined with issues of (in)equality, access, and power dynamics. In today’s world, death is perhaps more politicized as it ever was before. Wars, environmental crises, global migration patterns, and failing states bring death close to our homes. At the same time, technological, digital, and medical advancements alter our approaches to dealing with, thinking about, researching, and working with death. Such developments are equally inherently political, both in their origins and their applications.
As practitioners and scholars, how do we navigate the political dimensions of death? How does the political shape our engagement with death? And how can we reflect on and potentially change our own positions within this political landscape?
Death is political and performs the political. This is evident not only in death itself, but also in the dead (who can become political actors), their bodies, the process of dying (which is, amongst others, infrastructurally related to political discourse and inequalities), and bereavement (which can also become a political act). The political aspects of this theme extend beyond national or international political institutions (such as governments, state actors, multinational corporations, or political or religious alliances) to encompass everybody and everything that has to do with (the exercise of) power and moralities, e.g., families, kin, neighbourhoods, friendship networks.
We invite scholars and practitioners to consider this theme along the following lines:
Death becomes visible in policies, structures, and infrastructures. While seemingly (and/or wishing to be) neutral, (infra)structures often lead to exclusion and unequal access to end-of-life care. Hence, death, mortality, and the management of life-ending circumstances intersect with political agendas, policies, and decision-making processes. This makes us question:
How does death become visible and/or materialized in graveyards, cemeteries, crematoria, funeral homes, repatriation services, and other death-related facilities?
Whose and which deaths are included by political (infra)structures, and who/what is (made) invisible and visible?
Which deaths are made possible by political (infra)structures (on all scales, from the global to the local), e.g., by violence, war, climate change, and migration deals?
Which rules and regulations are put in place to deal with death, and what are the rationales behind these regulations?
How is death taught, talked about, and discussed in public spaces, such as classrooms, (social) media outlets, or political debates?
Which (new) techniques are developed to manage death, dying and disposal, and how do these reflect dominant discourses on death and dying?
The politics of death equally makes us question who owns death, who (or what) dies, who (or what) is allowed to die. This leads to questions such as:
How do uneven hierarchies of power operate to privilege some bodies and subjugate others?
Whose deaths are grievable and grieved about, and hence whose lives are considered valuable
How are lives and deaths framed differently, and by whom?
Who or what is categorized in such a way that it makes its killability allowed and/or justified, and how is this death organized?
How are “making die” and “letting die” (slow death) performed and justified, and by and for whom?
Whose lives are more mortal than others, and/or who or what has access to immortalities (e.g., technical, digital, or biological)?
How do ideas of (im)mortalities shape our perceptions of temporalities?
How does death function as site of resistance?
How can death and grief turn into a “mode of responsibility” and lead to activism?
As practitioners and scholars, we engage with death on a daily basis. Death is our object of study or the field in which we work. As such, we contribute to the political side of death. We can ask ourselves:
Who defines death (in relation to life) and how?
How do the questions we pose as scholars, and the work we do as professionals, relate to the ethical dimensions of death?
How do our ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics (as scholars) potentially limit the conventional study of death and dying?
How can we research death in a more open, inclusive manner?
Which death ontologies do we include/exclude in our work?
How do we do research amongst the marginalized (studying down) and the powerful (studying up)?
How does power play a role in our relations with our research subjects or clients?
How do we deal with death in our classrooms or lecture halls?
How do we talk about it with our students?
How do we train professionals in the field of death, dying and disposal?
How do insights from academic research engage with practices of death professionals?
What are the benefits of these engagements for our dealings with death?