Death & Culture II

Keynote biographies & abstracts:

Professor Joanna Bourke‌‌ ‌

‌Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and Fellow of the British Academy. She is the prize-winning author of thirteen books, including histories on modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, what it means to be human, death and dying, and rape. Most recently, she has published The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (OUP) and Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play are Invading our Lives (Virago). She is currently writing the history of Birkbeck for its bicentenary and is the Principal Investigator on a Wellcome Trust funded project entitled “Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry”.

Carved into the Body: Forensic Science, Truth, and the Female Corpse

Since the late nineteenth century, forensic science has become one of the dominant languages to describe, interpret, and give meaning to the dead body. As a scientific culture, it has not simply ‘inscribed’ its text on a ‘natural’ or pre-social body, but has collaborated in the creation of physiological bodies and metaphoric systems. In this paper, I focus on attempts by forensic scientists to ‘read’ the bodies of women who had been subjected to extreme violence. The belief that forensic scientists could generate objective truth from assessing and measuring physical markers changed dramatically over the centuries. Forensic assessments of the physiological body reiterated its constructed rather than intrinsic nature, periodically throwing the science into crisis mode.

Professor Dorthe Refslund Christensen‌

‌Since 2008, together with my research partner Kjetil Sandvik, University of Copenhagen, I have analyzed parents’ bereavement practices after loosing a baby, prior to, during or shortly after birth. Our focal points are: which ritualizations, media and materialities do parents use in their grief practices and, not the least, in the continued performance of parenthood in everyday life. The results have been presented in a large number of articles and papers. I am editor in chief of two international bookseries, Studies in Death, Materiality and the Origins of Time (Routledge; with prof. Rane Willerslev) and Sharing Death Online (Emerald Publishing; with Kjetil Sandvik); co-founder of the international research network Death Online Research Network and leader of the research unit Cultures and Practices of Death and Dying, Aarhus University.

Parents’ bereavement practices and beyond: performing parenthood in periods of grief and in everyday life

Loosing a child prior to, during or shortly after birth is emotionally challenging to the parents: their identity as parents-to-be and all preparations for becoming-parents as well as all hopes and dreams for the future are rendered meaningless when the child dies. In this situation, the process of grief becomes a way of reinstalling meaning by establishing an ongoing relationship to the dead child by which the child – who in life was barely there – gains existence and through which the identity as parents (however to a dead child) is established, communicated and socially acknowledged.

In this talk, I present the research we have done for the past ten years, on parents’ bereavement- and everyday life practices as parents to a dead child. Our empirical focuses have moved from parents’ online practices to their ritualizations on graves and to their everyday life routines continuously including the dead child in their family life. Methodologically, we have done ethnographic observational fieldwork on childrens graves, on dedicated websites and Facebook groups and interviews with bereaved parents. Theoretically, we have drawn on, for instance, conceptualizations on timework (Michael Flaherty); heterotopia (Michael Foucault) and ritualizations (Catherine Bell, and more), and the use of material objects as media (Joshua Meyrowitz and more).

Professor Dina Khapaeva

‌Dina Khapaeva is Professor at the School of Modern Languages at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research comprises death studies, cultural studies, historical memory, and intellectual history. Dr. Khapaeva has authored several mongraphs, including The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture (the University of Michigan Press, 2017), Nightmares: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project (Brill, 2013), and Portrait critique de la Russie: Essais sur la société gothique, (Eds. de l’Aube, 2012), shortlisted for a book prize Prix Russophonie 2014. Her articles have appeared in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Social Research, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Le Débat, Merkur, Social Sciences Information, et al. Most recently, she was invited to lecture at New College, Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, Emory University, and as a visiting professor at Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Death as a Cultural Condition

In the mid-1990s, a unique new way of engaging with death crystallized in Western culture: the mounting fascination with the “violent delights” of fictionalized death on screen and in fiction resurrected the Gothic and apocalyptic genres, galvanized horror with torture porn, slasher movies, and BDSM, and turned murderous monsters – vampires, zombies, serial killers, cannibals – into the new cultural idols. These artistic developments coincided with unprecedented and sweeping changes in funeral rituals, the spread of death symbolism in fashion, the invention of dark tourism and the marketing of murderabilia, the establishment of death education curricula, the proliferation of new concepts related to death, and the stunning popularity of Halloween celebration and the worship of Santa Muerte (“Saint Death”).

I propose a theoretical framework that connects interpretations of the simulated world of fiction and movies to social and cultural change, and considers the demand for images of violent death and the dramatic transformations in death-related practices as aspects of a single movement. I suggest that the new attitudes toward human beings articulated in the representations of popular culture should guide our understanding of the meaning invested in the new rituals, seasonal celebrations, vocabulary, educational initiatives, and commercial ventures. The cult of death, as I conceptualize this movement, reconsiders the place of humans in the spectrum of species, rejects human exceptionalism, and redefines our understanding of humanism and humanity in the secular value system. It offers antihumanism as a new popular cultural commodity.

In my talk, I will discuss the most important stages in the development of this movement from the late 1970s to the 2010s. The popular culture images altering our basic food taboo on eating humans will be the focus of my attention. This historical and cultural analysis will address the importance of the mortality studies to an understanding of the present cultural condition.

Professor Stephen Regan

‌

Stephen Regan is Professor of English at Durham University. His main teaching and research interests are in modern British, Irish, and American literature. He has written extensively about elegy and the poetry of mourning, and he teaches a special MA topic on elegy at Durham. His publications include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2004), The Nineteenth Century Novel: A Critical Reader (Routledge 2001), and Philip Larkin: The New Casebook (Macmillan 1997). He has recently completed The Sonnet (a critical history of the sonnet from the Renaissance to the present) for OUP, and is currently editing The Penguin Book of Elegy.