Marginal Death Research: Doing Edgework

There is a sustained western cultural fascination with death, dying, dead bodies and wounds that includes, but is not limited to film, television, artwork, music and literature making death one of the most fertile areas to conduct research. Yet, despite this prevalence of morbidity and death representation within everyday culture it remains overshadowed by the broader death studies research framework that focuses on policy and law - the practicalities of dealing with death, the dying and the dead. Through the topic of death, this symposium seeks to bring together research which is conducted across a range of disciplines but which is often swept to the edges of death studies due to its cultural nature. It seeks to provide a platform for researchers  to present and discuss their death edgework conducted in social science, the arts and humanities and contribute to the growing network of researchers engaging with death in unconventional ways.

Keynote address:

Professor Craig Young, 'A place for the dead?: socio-cultural approaches in death, dying and disposal - marginal or moving to the centre?'

This lecture will explore the contention of the symposium that "the broader death studies research framework focuses on policy and law - the practicalities of dealing with death, the dying and the dead" . It firstly examines research produced from a more socio-cultural perspective in Death Studies to consider its disciplinary place. It also explores related developments in other disciplines, particularly 'Deathscapes' in Cultural Geography, which have broadened investigations away from a policy and regulatory focus on death to the intersections of death, landscape, heritage, the everyday and memory. I then reflect upon a variety of contemporary encounters with corpses to reflect on how we might 'make a place' for them in contemporary social sciences' and humanities' perspectives. While there is an increase in interest in death, dying and disposal outside of the field of Death Studies, much of that work is fragmented and tends to theorise the dead as 'absent' or as an 'absent-presence'. The lecture will argue that the challenge for developing multi-disciplinary perspectives on the dead body is to engage with the increasing presence of them in contemporary society. Thus the focus needs to be shifted to notions of 'presence' and the social, cultural and political aspects of encounter. The lecture thus explores a range of such contemporary encounters in different contexts, exploring themes of materialities, mobilities, ethics and politics and how these encounters are increasingly mediated and shaped and enabled by technologies. While all this still has practical implications it also raises challenges and opportunities for approaches which are more informed by socio-cultural understandings of death, bodily disposal and the dead.

Programme:

You can download the conference programme here: Marginal Death Research Draft Programme (PDF , 56kb)