Category: Call for Papers

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New Exciting CfP: Special issue on Death

Dear all – it is our pleasure to draw your attention to a new exciting call for papers, which has been announced by the journal Research in Arts & Education.

Abstract submission deadline is soon: 9th November 2022.

In order to learn more, please CLICK HERE.

CALL FOR PAPERS: SPECIAL ISSUE ON DEATH

Death studies have been a discipline since the 1970s. Currently, death is a topical issue not least due to the war in Europe. Also, Covid-19 made the idea of death a little less remote in peoples’ ordinary life. But death does not concern only humans. The ongoing extinction prompts us to ponder if there are deaths we dismiss as not worth enough of our attention.

Death is an aesthetic, ethical, and ecological issue. Graveyards might be historically meaningful places as in Ulla Taipale’s environmental installation The Other Side in Barcelona 2018, but they take up space, and decomposing of bodies needs ecological solutions. Recently, interest in the materiality of death has increased, and many artists have dealt with death and dying. Photographs of Perttu Saksa, bioart works of Svenja Kratz, bronze sculptures of dead animals by Anne Koskinen, decomposed corpses on brass by Toni R. Toivonen, and Terike Haapoja’s Community (2007) serve as examples. From an artistic point of view, the binary of life and death might not be self-evident, but a threshold between life and death can be seen as a matter of varied discourses.

Nevertheless, there are aims to abolish death through technoscientific means. In his book, Karhun nimi [The Name of The Bear] (2006), philosopher Tere Vadén criticises natural sciences for promoting survivalism by developing new medicines and technologies to endure and enhance life. However, biological organisms strive at least as much toward death as toward survival. Deterioration and death are natural parts of life.

There has been a need to reconceptualise death. Queer Death Studies (QDS) is an emerging transdisciplinary field of research “that critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges the conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying and mourning,” as Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke write in Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective (2020). QDS focuses on necropolitics and asks, who are ignored in dominant stories of death, loss, grief, and mourning?

We invite articles, visual essays, and commentary papers dealing with artistic research, art practice, or theoretical and critical viewpoints on contemporary art of death, dying, and mourning.

Call for abstracts

Please submit a max. 150-word (not including references) abstract by November 9th, 2022, through Research in Arts and Education’s online platform: https://journal.fi/rae/about/submissions. Please note that you must register to the platform to submit your abstract. Make sure you use the submission section “Abstracts” when submitting the file. In “Comments to the editor,” write “CFP Death” and the manuscript format listed below (Practice-based/visual essay; Research-based article; Commentary paper).

The authors will be notified of the status of their abstract by November 15th, 2022, and are expected to send their full manuscripts by January 16th, 2023.

Research in Arts and Education grants open access to all publications and is ranked in the Publication Forum of The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies.

There are three recommended manuscript formats for Research in Arts and Education:

  • Practice-based / visual essay that studies the topic through artistic means. Artistic content must be accompanied by a written component in which the author describes, analyses, and/or reflects their artistic practice. The recommended length for this format is 3,000 words, including references.
  • Research-based article that studies the topic through academic means. The recommended length for this format is 6,000 words, including references.
  • Commentary paper that partakes in a topical discussion on art and/or research. The recommended length for this format is 3,000 words, including references.

Each format can include visual material as well as multimedia content (e.g., performative content, video, internet, or sound work, etc.). Since Research in Arts and Education is published in PDF format, multimedia content must be included as external links. Authors are responsible for hosting all external content as well as ensuring its accessibility, as Research in Arts and Education does not currently provide online hosting services.

Please email Eva Tordera Nuño (eva.torderanuno@aalto.fi) if you have any questions about submission procedures. This special issue is guest edited by Helena Sederholm (helena.sederholm@aalto.fi).

Key dates for authors

Deadline for abstracts: November 9th, 2022

Notification for abstract submissions: November 15th, 2022

Deadline for full contributions: January 16th, 2023

Reviewers’ deadline (1. round): February 15th, 2023

Revised manuscript due date: March 19th, 2023

Reviewers’ deadline (2. round): April 9th, 2023

Final manuscripts due date: May 5th, 2023

Publishing in June 2023

Submission procedure

Prospective authors are invited to submit their papers following the instructions provided on the RAE website: https://journal.fi/rae/about/submissions. The submitted manuscripts should not have been previously published, nor should they be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.

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Call for abstracts: Queer Death Studies Reader. Edited by Nina Lykke, Marietta Radomska and Tara Mehrabi

The field of Queer Death Studies

The planned reader will gather a wide range of contributions to the field of Queer Death Studies (QDS). This is an emerging, transdisciplinary field of study which takes research on death, dying, and mourning in new directions, inspired by feminist, posthumanist, decolonial, anti-racist, queer, trans, body- and affect-theoretical scholarship, art and activism (Radomska, Mehrabi and Lykke 2020). What distinguishes QDS from conventional Death Studies such as death sociology or anthropology of death is an overall critical focus on the framing of death and extinction in the contemporary world through Anthropocene necropolitics (Mbembe 2003, Lykke 2019) and necropowers of post/colonialism, racial and extractivist capitalism. Death is approached as an ethico-political issue that is embedded in global power structures. QDS pays attention to systematic, necropolitical productions of death, in dialogue with ethico-political critiques emerging from political movements for social, environmental and planetary justice and change. QDS is also based on critiques of the dichotomous divides, characterising Western modernity, and is marked out through a critical focus on normativities and exclusionary notions of the human, casting the death of those who differ from the normative human subject in terms of gender, racialisation, migration status, class, geopolitical situatedness, able-bodiedness, and species as less grievable or disposable and not counting at all (Butler 2004). In short, QDS aligns itself with critiques of the intra-acting multiplicity of hierarchising divides between appropriate and in/appropriate/d others (Minh-ha 1989), articulated by social, environmental and planetary justice movements.

The Call

With this call, we invite abstracts from researchers, students, artists and activists who see their research and activities as aligned with critiques of the necropowers operating in the contemporary world, and who want to contribute to queering, decolonising and posthumanising death and the onto-epistemololgies and politics conventionally framing death.

Queering, Decolonising and Posthumanising

The verbform, queering, which we use here, encompasses a wide range of meanings. It refers to (1) open-ended deconstructing of normativities and processes of normalisation in various forms, as well as (2) undoing of heteropatriarchy, heteronormativity, binary gender and sexualities governed by reproductive biopowers or, in other words, the normative heterosexual matrix. Queering death is thus on the one hand understood as a critical strange-making, and defamiliarising, which may imply affirmative openings of other horizons than Christian and Cartesian dualist approaches to death, for example a focus on the vibrant entanglement of growing and decomposing (Radomska 2017; Lykke 2022). On the other hand, queering means critically focusing on the ways in which misogyny, trans- and queerphobia lead to social as well as physical death, and how violence and hate crimes towards non-normative individuals seek to render their lives and deaths non-grievable (Puar 2007; Chen 2012; Snorton 2017). Together with this broad spectrum of meanings, we also want to emphasise that queering should be understood in its intersections with decolonising and posthumanising efforts

Decolonising death involves critically dismantling the violent necropowers of colonisation, racial and extractivist capitalism, which for centuries have made death become ”life’s quiet companion” (Lehman 1997) for racialised and indigenous people worldwide, as well as confronting the over-arching racisms which continue to produce (physical, social and cultural) death along racialised lines. Moreover, decolonising death signals a turn towards pluritopic hermeneutics (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2009), i.e. hermeneutics which do not universalise Western modern frameworks, and which reevaluate indigenous philosophies, cosm-ontologies and sensibilities. In terms of life/death thresholds, this implies critically-affirmatively shifting the meanings of death, for example, substituting conceptualisations and imaginaries of death as a final endpoint within a chrononormative linear temporality, and instead opting for understandings, situated in geo- and corpo-political frameworks outside of Western modernity (e.g. Smith 1999; Anzaldua 2015).

Posthumanising death refers to the systematic problematisation of the planetary-scale mechanisms of annihilation of the more-than-human world in their ontological, epistemological and ethico-political dimensions. It involves critical analyses of the human/nonhuman divide and power differentials that have allowed for the reduction of the nonhuman to mere resource and instrument for human endeavours. Furthermore, the posthumanising move entails unpacking philosophical and cultural meanings of extinction and the ways in which it fundamentally disrupts life processes in relation to time, death and generations (e.g. Rose 2012); it draws attention to environmental violence, environmental grief, as well as nonhuman death manufactured en masse through anthropocentric habits of consumption and mechanisms of extractivism.

Consequently, posthumanising death takes seriously the issues of responsibility, accountability and care for/in dying more-than-human worlds, while remaining grounded in radical critiques of human exceptionalism, and affirmative embrace of alternatives (eg. Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016; MacCormack 2020).

Formats and deadlines:

We call for abstracts of approximately 300 words, to be accompanied by a bio-note of approximately 200 words, as well as by a title of the proposed chapter and an indication of how the chapter relates to the below main themes to be covered in the reader.

Please, send your abstract etc to ninly[at]fastmail.fm , cc: <marietta.radomska[at]liu.se> and <tara.mehrabi[at]kau.se>

Abstract DEADLINE: 1st NOVEMBER, 2021

We will respond to your abstract by MID-JANUARY 2022, and foresee submissions of FIRST DRAFT CHAPTERS by August 1, 2022.

We plan a reader with around 50 contributions, including a few reprints of classics. Scholarly as well as creative and artistic contributions are welcome! We hope together with contributors to build a reader which will be significant and agenda-setting for the field

Thematic clusters:

*Queering Death: Rethinking life/death ecologies

*Histories of necropowers and Anthropocene necropolitics

*Decolonising death

*Posthumanising death

*Demedicalising death

*Politics and Ethics of Mourning

*Alternative Spiritual, Aesthetic and Arts Activist Approaches to Death and After-life

The International Network for Queer Death Studies

The idea for the reader grew out of the international network for Queer Death Studies, which was founded in 2016, (see https://queerdeathstudies.net/). The network has organised several workshops and an international conference at Karlstad University, Sweden, in 2019.

We have earlier published two special journal issues of Australian Feminist Studies (2020, Vol 35 (104)), and Women, Gender and Research (2019: Issue 3-4).

References

Anzaldua, G. E. (2015), Light in the Dark/Luz en Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Reality, Spirituality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York, NY: Verso.

Chen, M. Y. (2012), Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Lehman, G. (1997), ‘Life’s Quiet Companion’, in G. Carey and R. Sorenson (eds), The Penguin Book of Death, 223–232, Ringwood: Penguin Australia.

Lykke, N. (2019), ‘Making Live and Letting Die: Cancerous Bodies between Anthropocene Necropolitics and Chthulucene Kinship’, Environmental Humanities, 11 (1): 108–36.

Lykke, N (2022), Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

MacCormack, Patricia (2020a), The Ahuman Manifesto. Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Mbembe, A. (2003), Necropolitics, Public Culture, 15 (1): 11–40.

Minh-ha, T. T. (1989), Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington and Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press.

Puar, J. (2007), Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke UP-

Radomska, M., T. Mehrabi, and N. Lykke (2020), Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning From a Queerfeminist Perspective, Australian Feminist Studies, 35(104): 81-100.

Radomska, M. (2017), Non/living Matter, Bioscientific Imaginaries and Feminist Technoecologies of Bioart, Australian Feminist Studies, 32 (94): 377-394.

Rose, D. B. (2012), Multispecies knots of ethical time, Environmental Philosophy, 9(1): 127–140.

Shildrick, M (2020) Queering the Social Imaginaries of the Dead, Australian Feminist Studies, 35(104): 170-185.

Smith, L.T. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New York: Zed books.

Snorton, C.R (2017), Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tlostanova, M. and W. Mignolo (2009), On Pluritopic Hermeneutics, Trans-Modern Thinking, and Decolonial Philosophy, Encounters, 1 (1): 11–27.

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Call for Chapters for Edited Book – Death and Dying at the Margins: Material-Discursive Perspectives on Death and Dying (tentative title)

When: DEADLINE for abstracts extended until May 21, 2021; completed drafts due November 1, 2021.

Where: Contact Jesse Peterson <jesse.peterson@slu.se> or Natashe Lemos Dekker <n.lemos.dekker@fsw.leidenuniv.nl> or Phil Olson <prolson@vt.edu>

Invitation

The third and final plate of mushroom risotto arrived. I was seated with Natashe and Philip, the night before we were to convene and discuss papers that explored the material-discursive aspects of death and dying. It seemed fitting, as the mushroom almost cloyed my tastebuds, that each of us would settle on fungus, often a symbol for decay, dissolution, and putrefaction. Fruiting harbingers that, by confronting their observers with the transformation of death back into life, challenge the definitions of the living, dying, alive, dead, not-alive, undead, and more. Reflecting on this moment, I can say that it was this very challenge that brought us together, the question of how materialities, practices, and stories help to organize the ambivalences in human determinations of those deemed dead or dying.

As confirmed by our workshop as well as our 2020 4S conference panel on the same theme, the three of us recognized that this challenge is taken up time and time again in different ways and that it extends beyond human death. The current corona pandemic highlights the significance of asking this question. Yet, this pandemic ought not overshadow the ways by which individuals, governments, and other interest groups negotiate with other kinds of dying, such as the disappearance of a loved one, the loss of a child before it is born, the inability to care for oneself due to dementia, the planned eradication of an invasive plant, the extinction of one species after the next, or the “death” of a river or lake. We all face the inevitable death of our own bodies, but also, through living, the countless deaths of others. Through meeting the messiness in dying, as scholars, we hope to navigate and attend to the complex, often difficult emotions of loss, grief, release, and more.

Gathering momentum from this convergence of how to negotiate the death of the human (literally and as enlightened subject) and nature (physically and as separate space), the three of us invite contributions to a forthcoming edited collection on the material-discursive aspects of dying. We’re excited to hear and learn from you.

The Call

Call for Chapters for Edited Book – Death and Dying at the Margins: Material-Discursive Perspectives on Death and Dying (tentative title)

Edited by Natashe Lemos Dekker (Anthropology, Leiden University), Phil Olson (STS, Virginia Tech), and Jesse Peterson (Environmental Studies, Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet)

Subject Fields: Including, but not exclusively Environmental History / Studies, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, STS, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural History / Studies, Animal Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Queer Studies

Death is often assumed to arrive when heart and lungs stop, or when certain kinds of brain activities cease. Yet the borders between life and death are often unclear.  Death may get interrupted, delayed, or come undone, disrupting the “natural” and “normal” forms of a “good” death. We acknowledge such disruptions as material and discursive; that is, bodies, minds, geographies, stories, and more act to challenge human perspectives on how people, animals, plants, or things ought to die and where and how the dead ought to be laid to rest. What seemed coherent no longer is, both due to the breakdown or dissolution of that which is dying and due to the (dis)ordering of worlds and afterworlds. 

The editors seek contributions that will explore socio-ecological networks of the dying and dead that exist at the margins. Such work invites us to pursue and further identify ways to explore and establish connections between dying and death from perspectives that refute a nature/culture binary—to ask questions such as: 

  • What boundary work takes place to construct and maintain the categories of alive, not-alive, dead, dying, and undead for places, objects, and beings? 
  • How do states and processes of acquiescing to, existing in between, manipulating, or overcoming life and/or death affect normative assumptions about dying and death? 
  • What might it mean to reconfigure human understanding of death to a more ecological frame that accommodates more-than-human lives and/or deep time?
  • How might the memories, spirits, or spiritualities related to the dead and dying limit, expand, or explode a material-discursive frame?
  • How do such challenges alter ethical approaches or values attached to dying and death? 

We especially encourage submissions from scholars whose research practices consider feminist and queer studies, new materialism and waste, plant and animal studies, non-western or indigenous studies, and/or death studies.

If you would like to contribute your work, please indicate your willingness to participate by providing: 

(1) a 400-500 word abstract with title, and 

(2) a short biography of all co-authors.

The deadline for abstract submissions is February 26, 2021. If your proposal is accepted, you will receive a timeline of due dates. The tentative due date for the completed chapter is August 27, 2021.

Inquiries and proposals welcome: Contact Jesse Peterson <jesse.peterson@slu.se> or Natashe Lemos Dekker <n.lemos.dekker@fsw.leidenuniv.nl> or Phil Olson <prolson@vt.edu>

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Call for short contributions (500-2000 words): What do we talk about when we talk about queer death? (Whatever Journal)

Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies (https://whatever.cirque.unipi.it/) is inviting submissions for short contributions (500-2000 words) to be collected in a multi-authored article entitled “What do we talk about when we talk about queer death?”. The article will introduce the themed section Queer thanatologies (edited by A.C. Corradino, C. Dell’Aversano, R. Langhi and M. Petricola) that will appear in Whatever’s next issue in summer 2021.

Queer death studies has recently emerged as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry investigating the cultural performances related to death, dying, grief, and disposal from the perspective of queer theory, defined as a hermeneutical stance whose premises could be summed up as follows: «queer states that any construction of identity (including LGBT ones) is a performance constituting a subject which does not “exist” prior to it, and encourages to bring into being (both as objects of desire, of fantasy and of theoretical reflection and as concrete existential and political possibilities) alternative modes of performance» (Dell’Aversano 2010: 74-75). Driven by the will to «reconceptualis[e] death, dying and mourning in relentlessly norm-critical ways» (Radomska, Mehrabi, and Lykke 2020: 82), the field of queer death studies is developing and expanding in a number of directions. Some center on an «overall attention to necropolitics and necropowers» (ibidem: 85); some focus on peripheral, non-normative, and anti-normative identities, among which are those falling within the LGBT+ spectrum; some devote to non-humans as both subjects and objects of grief; some explore the construction of corpses as objects of desire in literature and the arts, as well as their position in spiritual and other kinds of political activism; some are grounded in category theory and the social sciences and aimed at the theoretical deconstruction of the life/death polarity itself, considered as one of the most fundamental constructs for the development of every human culture; some critically-affirmatively take a posthuman and/or decolonial point of departure in life/death, considered as a spiritual-material continuum, encouraging an ecophilosophical focus on the vibrancies of all non/living matter beyond the dualisms (mind-soul/body, culture/nature, human/non-human), cherished by Western modernity.

We encourage scholars, activists, thanatologists, and other queer death friends working in any field to contribute to the ongoing development of queer death studies by answering the question “what do we talk about when we talk about queer death?” in a bite-sized format. Your theoretical reflections, case studies, notes, and thoughts are invaluable for mapping this ever-expanding field.

Short contributions should be sent to Mattia Petricola (mattia.petricola[at]gmail.com) by January 27, 2021. For any question or information, for expressing your interest in this publication or discussing your contribution, do not hesitate to get in touch.

References

Dell’Aversano, Carmen. 2010. ‘The Love Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken: Queering the Human-Animal Bond’. Journal for Critical Animal Studies VIII (1/2): 73–125.

http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/JCAS-Vol-VIII-Issue-I-and-II-2010-Full-Issue1.pdf.

Radomska, Marietta, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke. 2020. ‘Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective’. Australian Feminist Studies 35 (104): 81–100.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952.

You can also download the CfP as a pdf file below:

CfP:Download here

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CFP: Dying at the Margins: A critical exploration of Material-Discursive Perspectives to Death and Dying

Organizers: Natashe Lemos Dekker (University of Amsterdam and Leiden University Medical Center) and Jesse D Peterson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Place: Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Dates: September 26-27, 2019

Description

Death is often assumed to arrive when heart and lungs stop. Yet, sometimes the borders between life and death are unclear. Death, then, may get interrupted, delayed, or come undone, disrupting the “natural” and “normal” forms of a “good” death. We acknowledge such disruptions as material and discursive; that is, bodies, minds, geographies, stories, and more act to challenge human perspectives on how people, animals, plants, or things ought to die and where and how the dead ought to be laid to rest. Suddenly, what seemed coherent no longer is, in the breakdown or dissolution of that which is dying but also in the way one orders worlds and afterworlds.

This workshop, thus, seeks to explore socio-ecological networks of the dying and dead that exist at the margins. We see tantalizing glimpses of this endeavor in the work of Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necro-politics” that explores the instrumentalization and material destruction of the human, Philip R. Olson’s “necro-waste” that looks at the human body as a form of material waste, and Joshua Reno’s work on the biosemiotics of shit as a “sign of life.” Such work invites us to pursue and further identify ways to explore and establish connections between dying and death from perspectives that refute a nature/culture binary—to ask questions such as:

·       What boundary work takes place to construct and maintain the categories of alive, not-alive, dead, dying, and undead for places, objects, and beings?

·       How do states and processes of acquiescing to, existing in between, manipulating, or overcoming life and/or death affect normative assumptions about dying and death?

·       What might it mean to reconfigure human understanding of death to a more ecological frame that accommodates more-than-human lives and/or deep time?

·       How might the memories, spirits, or spiritualities related to the dead and dying limit, expand, or explode a material-discursive frame?

·       How do such challenges alter ethical approaches or values attached to dying and death?

Through this workshop, we hope to build a bridge between scholars working in the medical and environmental humanities and the social sciences, providing a venue to put into conversation research that explores how dying “bodies”—animal (including human), plant, thing, place—challenge natural, normative, and notions of a “good” death.  We encourage applications from scholars whose research practices consider feminist and queer studies, new materialism and waste, plant and animal studies, non-western or indigenous studies, and/or death studies.

Deadline for abstracts is June 5, 2019. Please send your abstract (max 250 words) and a short biography (100 words) to Natashe Lemos Dekker (N.LemosDekker@uva.nl) and Jesse Peterson (jessep@kth.se). Notifications of acceptance will be sent on June 11, 2019 or shortly thereafter.

We are happy to announce that Philip R. Olsen and Marietta Radomska will give keynote lectures and participate in the workshop. Participants will be asked to submit their papers by August 31. These will be pre-circulated to all participants and each paper assigned a discussant. Papers do not need to be finished articles, but can take the form of a think piece of up to 6 pages. We ask all participants to read all contributions beforehand to ensure in-depth discussion. During the workshop, each participant will pitch their work, followed by another participant who will act as a discussant, and who will pose remarks and questions. All participants will be allocated a text to discuss.

The workshop will be held at KTH – Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm on September 26-27, 2019. A workshop dinner will take place on the night of the 26th. Lunch and coffee will also be provided free of charge during the workshop. We may be able to offer partial travel reimbursement for some applicants.

See the original post here

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CfP for a special issue of Women, Gender & Research on Queer Death Studies

Cfp: KKF 2019/2-3: Queer Death Studies

Call for Papers:
Queer Death Studies: Coming to Terms with Death, Dying and Mourning Differently

Special issue
Women, Gender & Research, 2019/2-3

Queer Death Studies (QDS) refers to an emerging transdisciplinary field of research that critically and (self) reflexively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning.

Since its establishment as a research field in the 1970s, Death Studies has drawn attention to the questions of death, dying, and mourning as complex and multifaceted phenomena that require inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches and perspectives. Yet, the engagements with death, dying and mourning, constitutive of conventional Death Studies’ investigations, tend to remain insufficient and reductive. They are often governed by the normative notions of: the subject; bonds between humans, as well as between humans and (their) animals; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement. Moreover, these engagements are frequently embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms, characteristic of the Western cultural imaginaries.

Against this background, QDS offers a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying, and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns.

This special issue invites academic as well as artistic contributions that focus on and explore the ways queer theory and queer perspectives can help us rethink death, dying, remains, afterlife, mourning and the life-death dichotomy.

The topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Queer methodologies of researching death, dying and mourning
– Queer practices of mourning and bereavement
– Materiality of death and corpses
– Death/life ecologies
– Necropolitics and borders
– Un/grievable lives and deaths
– Death and biotechnology/biomedicine
– Queering cancer and other life-threatening diseases
– Suicide
– Technologies of life/death
– Queer widowhood
– Decolonialising death
– Illness narratives and death
– Ethico-politics and practices of killability
– Nonhuman death and dying
– Extinction and annihilation
– Death and acts of resistance
– ‘Slow death’
– Queering temporalities of death
– Queer spiritualities

Editors:
Marietta Radomska, postdoc, Linköping University, Sweden
Tara Mehrabi, postdoc, University of Turku, Finland
Nina Lykke, professor emerita, Linköping University, Sweden

Deadline for abstracts (max 300-word + up to 100 word author bio): June 25, 2018
Deadline for articles: December 1, 2018

All contributions must be in English and should be submitted to: redsek@soc.ku.dk

Guidelines for contributors: http://koensforskning.soc.ku.dk/english/kkof/guidelines/

Download the call as pdf.

For more information about the journal Women, Gender & Research / Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, see:
http://koensforskning.soc.ku.dk/kkf or http://koensforskning.soc.ku.dk/english/kkof

See also: http://koensforskning.soc.ku.dk/english/kkof/call-for-papers/cfp-kkf-20192-3-queer-death-studies/

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Deadline EXTENDED

Dear all,

Due to many requests we received, we have decided to extend the abstract deadline for The Third International Queer Death Studies Workshop until 18th March 2018. You can find more information on the workshop, including the CfP here, or in the pdf version here.

We hope that in this way those of you who would like to take active part in the workshop and haven’t managed to get in touch with us will now have a few more days to do so!

We are so much looking forward to hearing from you and to the workshop itself!

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The Third International Queer Death Studies Workshop “Death Matters: Death and Dying in a Queer Context”, 30-31 May 2018 Linköping University, Sweden

CALL FOR PAPERS

3qds

Queer Death Studies Network (QDSN) was officially launched in November 2016 at the G16: Swedish National Gender Research Conference in Linköping and has been vividly developing since then. The network constitutes a space for researchers, students, artists, activists, and other practitioners who critically and (self) reflexively investigate and challenge conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning.

The conventional engagements with the questions of death, dying and mourning are insufficient and reductive: they are often governed by the normative notions of the subject; interhuman and human/nonhuman bonds; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement.  Moreover, these engagements are often embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms.

Against this background, QDSN serves as a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns.

During our previous workshops we have focused on the ways queer theory and queer perspectives can help us rethink death, dying, remains, afterlife, mourning and the life-death dichotomy. In other words, we have explored what ‘queer’ means and, most importantly, what it does to the question of death in its multiple incarnations and avenues.

The upcoming workshop concentrates on the notions of ‘death’ and ‘dying’ as such. What do death and dying mean? What is the relationship between death and dying? How do death and dying matter (and materialise) beyond the normative structures constitutive of ontological, epistemological, ethical, legal, and conventional religious frames? What are and what can be the onto-epistemological, ethical, cultural and legal implications of rethinking death and dying through a queer(ing) lens? And, in turn, what does focusing on and rethinking of death and dying do to queer studies? What does it do to the cultural imaginaries and practices?

The workshop will consist of individual papers (20 min), arranged in panel sessions, followed by Q&A and joint discussions. We welcome submissions from both academics and non-academics, as the event aims to mobilise transversal dialogues on the theme. If you would like to present a paper at the workshop, please, send an abstract (max 300 words), accompanied by a short bio (up to 100 words) to: tara.mehrabi [at] liu.se. Deadline EXTENDED: 18 March 2018.

The event starts on 30th May at 10:15 and ends on 31st May at 16:00 in Linköping, Sweden.

Unfortunately, the workshop is organised on a very low budget, which means that we are not able to cover the travel and accommodation costs for the speakers.

The workshop is available to everyone and there is no participant fee.

We will provide participants with coffee/tea and snacks, but dinner and lunch will be on self-paid basis.

If you would like to take part in the workshop on these (self-paying) conditions and would like to apply for an external funding to cover the travel, food and accommodation costs, we will be most happy to provide you with an official invitation letter.