Death studies typically focus on the death of humans, overlooking the wider factors involved in social and natural processes around death. This edited volume provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond human death, to reveal the complex interconnections among human and more than human creatures, entities and environments.
Bringing together a diverse range of international scholars, the book sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures. Organised around three themes – Knowledge and Mediation, Care and Remembrance, and Agency and Power – this book pushes the boundaries of death studies to explore death and dying from beyond the perspective of a nature/culture binary.
Table of Content
Introduction – Jesse D. Peterson, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Philip R. Olson
Part I: Ontologies & Epistemologies
1. ‘Seeing for real’: Forensic Pathologists Testing the Demonstrative Power of Postmortem Imaging – Céline Schnegg, Séverine Rey, Alejandro Dominguez
2. Death at a Planetary Scale: Mortality’s Materiality in the Context of the Anthropocene – Philip R. Olson
3. Death in the Fields: Microbial ‘Destruction’ in Polluted Soils – Serena Zanzu
4. Can the Baltic Sea Die? An Environmental Imaginary of a Dying Sea – Jesse D. Peterson
Part II: Care & Remembrance
5. Viral Flows and Immunological Gestures: Contagious and Dead Bodies in México and Ecuador during COVID-19 – Rosa Inés Padilla Yépez, Anne W. Johnson
6. Advertising the Ancestors: Ghanaian Funeral Banners as Image Objects – Isabel Bredenbroker
7. Dying Apart and Buried Together: COVID-19, Cemeteries, and Fears of Collective Burial – Samuel Holleran
8. Spirit Mediums at the Margins: Materiality, Death, and Dying in Northern Zimbaabwee – Olga Sicilia
Part III: Troubling Agencies
9. Rehabilitate or Euthanize?: Biopolitics and Care in Seal Conservation – Doortje Hoerst
10. Troubling Entanglements: Death, Loss and the Dead in and on Television – Bethan Michael-Fox
11. Material Entanglements of the Corpse – Marc Trabsky and Jacinthe Flore
12. The Dead Who Would be Trees and Mushrooms – Hannah Gould, Tamara Kohn, Michael Arnold, Allison Fraser
Concluding Discussion
13. Beyond the Norms – Jesse D. Peterson, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Philip R. Olson
About the author
Philip R. Olson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.
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