Category: Books

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Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies is OUT!

At the end of October 2025 – which means already five months ago – the long awaited major publication came out!

The 758-page volume: Routledge International Hanbook of Queer Death Studies, edited by Nina Lykke, Tara Mehrabi, and Marietta Radomska encompasses 63 chapters, written by 75 authors. The book consists of seven thematic sections: I. Rethinking  Life/Death Ecologies and Temporalities; II. Anthropocene Necropolitics and Extinction; III. Caring Death Activism; IV. Aesthetics and Mediated Imaginaries of Death; V. Politics and Ethics of Grieving Practices and Remembrance; VI. Co-Becoming with the Dead and Spectral Mourning; and VII. Imagining Life/Death Entanglements Differently.

Broadly speaking, the Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive, international cartography of Queer Death Studies, offering broad, in-depth insights into the field and its emergence through tentacular transdisciplinary networking. Taking research and art-making on death, dying, mourning, and afterlife into new directions, it explores the multiple effects of contemporary necropolitics and the proliferation of death-worlds during the current period of Earth’s history, ‘The Anthropocene’ or ‘the Age of Man’.

Informed by queer, critical posthumanist, decolonial, and feminist approaches, the Handbook presents a unique variety of both critical and affirmative reflections upon the world’s intersecting necropowers, and ethico-political potentials for social and environmental change. Contributors speculate on ways to reimagine life/ death-relations as vibrant entanglements. They also investigate modes of mourning differently, resisting necropolitical regimes that deem human and non-human individuals and populations to be disposable and non-grievable when they differ too much from the normative modern subject, Universal Man, in terms of intersections of gender, racialisation, class, sexuality, embodiment, embrainment, geopolitical positioning, or species.

A thought provoking read, this Handbook is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, artists, teachers, students, death-professionals, (health)careworkers, activists, and NGOs interested in tools to rethink and reimagine death, dying, mourning, and afterlife from intersections of queering, decolonising, posthumanising, and feminist perspectives.

The volume includes two chapters that are available in OPEN ACCESS.

The cover of the Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies
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Exciting NEW PUBLICATION: Death’s Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human

It is our great pleasure to feature here on our blog the latest publication coming out via Bristol University Press and edited by Jesse D. Peterson, Natashe Lemos Dekker and Philip R. Olson – a collection entitled Death’s Social and Material Meaning Beyond the Human (out on 9th January 2024).

The Bristol University Press website includes the following book description:

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.

Check out this exciting book once it’s out and make sure your local/university library includes it in its collection!

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New Book Coming Out Soon!

Nina Lykke:

Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning.

Bloomsbury Academic, London.

WILL BE AVAILABLE FROM DECEMBER 2021, MORE INFO:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/vibrant-death-9781350149731/


Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book’s ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book’s posthuman de-exceptionalising of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material).

Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine ”I”, who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death’s material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilised algae. It is argued that the mourning “I”’s intimate bodily empathising (theorised as symphysising) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject.