Dates: 08-09 June 2018

Location: University of Bath, UK

Over the last fifteen-years, first world popular culture’s interest in human mortality significantly expanded and death and dying achieved new levels of media attention.

But what of death’s politics? Or the politics of dying and end-of-life? What role does political power play in everyday experiences of human mortality?

The June 2018 Centre for Death and Society Annual Conference will focus on the Politics of Death and what the discovery and re-discovery of death politics means for power, sovereignty, bioethics, the rule of law, and most importantly – death and dying.

Possible topics could include:

• Assisted dying
• Activism and death politics
• Feminist critiques of death politics across time
• The history of death focussed activism (e.g., AIDS and ACT-UP, Black Lives Matter, etc.)
• Power relationships between the state and the individual
• The economics of death and poverty
• Brexit and transnational politics of death (e.g., post-mortem repatriation, cadaveric organ sharing, etc.)
• Death and human choice
• The politics of death nostalgia o Death and social class
• Debates around life and death and personhood
• State ordered executions and capital punishment
• Death technologies of power, control, discipline, and preservation o Cultural appropriation and commodification
• Isolation at the end of life
• The commodification of death experiences
• Political protests and dead political leaders
• (Neo)colonialism and death politics
• Memorialisation / monumentalisation of dead political leaders
• The politics of post-mortem evidence in policy making and with policy makers
• Human Rights Law and genocide
• Urban planning and deathscapes

Please send a 300 Word abstract to cdas@bath.ac.uk by 28 February 2018.