This year’s PSL faculty will each lead a seminar responding to the question-provocation “Why do dead bodies matter?” from their disciplinary or practice-based perspective.
We are particularly interested in how the “dead body” in the past years has emerged as a key problematic in various fields, from Death Studies to posthumanism and feminist materialism, as well as its centrality to critical theoretical paradigms (biopolitics/necropolitics) and prominent political struggles of our times (Black Lives Matter, politics of mourning). At the same time, the liminality of the corpse (simultaneously human and nonhuman, present and absent, sacred and abject, here and there, silent and expressive) has rendered it historically as a core figure for theorizing ethics and responsibility, ontology, technology and the image. How do philosophers, anthropologists, activists, artists and photographers (who, of course, might be a mix of the above) address the dilemmas posed by witnessing, re-presenting and dis-posing the dead body? Finally, how are disciplines that were established around the use of human remains as “evidence” (archaeology, biological anthropology, criminology) addressing – or sidestepping – these kinds of questions?
In short, by bringing together experts from various fields where these conversations are taking place along different lines, we hope to cross-pollinate, synthesize and make unexpected connections that might contribute to -- but also draw on -- the research backgrounds, activist experience, creative practice and diverse reading/listening viewing “playlists” of the PSL cohort.
More details about the seminars, will be forthcoming.
We are particularly interested in how the “dead body” in the past years has emerged as a key problematic in various fields, from Death Studies to posthumanism and feminist materialism, as well as its centrality to critical theoretical paradigms (biopolitics/necropolitics) and prominent political struggles of our times (Black Lives Matter, politics of mourning). At the same time, the liminality of the corpse (simultaneously human and nonhuman, present and absent, sacred and abject, here and there, silent and expressive) has rendered it historically as a core figure for theorizing ethics and responsibility, ontology, technology and the image. How do philosophers, anthropologists, activists, artists and photographers (who, of course, might be a mix of the above) address the dilemmas posed by witnessing, re-presenting and dis-posing the dead body? Finally, how are disciplines that were established around the use of human remains as “evidence” (archaeology, biological anthropology, criminology) addressing – or sidestepping – these kinds of questions?
In short, by bringing together experts from various fields where these conversations are taking place along different lines, we hope to cross-pollinate, synthesize and make unexpected connections that might contribute to -- but also draw on -- the research backgrounds, activist experience, creative practice and diverse reading/listening viewing “playlists” of the PSL cohort.
More details about the seminars, will be forthcoming.