Death’s Social and Material Meaning beyond the Human

Jesse D. Peterson is Lecturer and Assistant Professor with the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork. Natashe Lemos Dekker is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Philip R. Olson is Associate Professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.

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