PSL 4 will probe a critical and pressing issue of our times by considering how the dead body, increasingly configured as the basis for political mobilization for human rights via public mourning, informs the biopolitical/necropolitical dimensions of precarious life. All around the world, from the ‘refugee crisis’ playing out on Greek coastlines and seas to the ongoing migration ‘war’ along the U.S.-Mexican border, contested deathscapes have emerged that expose the bloody borders of citizenship. Neoliberalism has invested in living death -- or deadly living, propagating spectral effects in media space (from pop culture zombies to corpse memes) and generating profit and knowledge from the digital afterlife. Meanwhile, violence continues to hemorrhage from every (un)exceptional death (femicides, queer/trans murders, drowned/missing migrants), punctuating the longer temporalities of environmental catastrophe (climate change, toxicities) with critical demands to decenter the “human” dead and consider the relentless histories of human exploitation of animal death (not least as a way to draw the “dehumanization” of precarious human life into a shared context). Along these lines the recent Australian bushfires and Amazon rainforest wildfires prefigure the collective planetary stakes of considering how and why dead bodies matter. In addressing the inequalities, hierarchies and racisms involved in which dead bodies “matter”, we aim to cultivate an expanded ethics of care in a political climate of heightened racism and intolerance, inciting a historical and social responsibility -- read response-ability -- for unjust and untimely deaths.
PSL 4 will bring together an acclaimed international and interdisciplinary faculty and cohort to address and tease out the materialities, spatialities, temporalities and technologies in and through which the contested dead remain, haunt and impact critical contemporary debates over citizenship, cultural memory and historical responsibility, national and religious religious identity, ideas about race, kinship, gender, sexuality, multifarious modes of violence (from interpersonal to postcolonial and species-based), climate change, human/animal relations, affective publics, data/power, and many, many other matters. The witnessing, disposal and mourning of dead bodies has emerged in the past years as a critical object of reflection and interrogation in daily life, as well as across a number of theoretical paradigms: from the sociological “Death Studies” initially focused on end-of-life care to the “new” anthropology of death/the dead that has foregrounded the ‘governance’ of dead bodies and human remains and the critique of the social abandonment/killing of marginalized, racialized, gendered Others, to the posthumanist critique of the dichotomy of inert death vs. generative life, illuminating the productive intensities of dead bodies. We are particularly interested in the so-called “forensic turn” which has encompassed a historical/semiotic analysis of the corpse’s centrality to the evidentiary paradigm of modern state power, buttressed by scientific knowledge (criminology, medicine, archaeology, anthropology) and contemporary interventions in "public truth" (Forensic Architecture). What are the consequences of the hegemony of the CSI-style genetics-based evidential paradigm with its hidden dynamic racial profiling for critical modalities of witnessing trauma, violence, and loss? How might visual and new media studies, as well as art history and practice, sharpen our focus on technologies and aesthetics of re-presentation (photography) and em-bodiment (taxidermy, memes) involved in witnessing the corpse, drawing out a more expansive consideration of the role of images and digital networks in the circulation, proliferation and affective augmentation of dead bodies.
The PSL will climax on the final day with the hosting of a public “death cafe,” that will be designed by the PSL4 cohort. By staging an encounter among unlikely conversants regarding our most shared -- yet most ‘secret’ and intimate -- topic, we aim to bridge the gaps among scholarly discourse, personal experience and local knowledge. Further, we hope to create space for critical and substantive reflection regarding how we live with death and the dead, take responsibility for the death of the precarious Other and confront the fact of our own deaths: issues, ultimately, of profound ethical, political and cultural import for how we live today -- and together.
PSL 4 will bring together an acclaimed international and interdisciplinary faculty and cohort to address and tease out the materialities, spatialities, temporalities and technologies in and through which the contested dead remain, haunt and impact critical contemporary debates over citizenship, cultural memory and historical responsibility, national and religious religious identity, ideas about race, kinship, gender, sexuality, multifarious modes of violence (from interpersonal to postcolonial and species-based), climate change, human/animal relations, affective publics, data/power, and many, many other matters. The witnessing, disposal and mourning of dead bodies has emerged in the past years as a critical object of reflection and interrogation in daily life, as well as across a number of theoretical paradigms: from the sociological “Death Studies” initially focused on end-of-life care to the “new” anthropology of death/the dead that has foregrounded the ‘governance’ of dead bodies and human remains and the critique of the social abandonment/killing of marginalized, racialized, gendered Others, to the posthumanist critique of the dichotomy of inert death vs. generative life, illuminating the productive intensities of dead bodies. We are particularly interested in the so-called “forensic turn” which has encompassed a historical/semiotic analysis of the corpse’s centrality to the evidentiary paradigm of modern state power, buttressed by scientific knowledge (criminology, medicine, archaeology, anthropology) and contemporary interventions in "public truth" (Forensic Architecture). What are the consequences of the hegemony of the CSI-style genetics-based evidential paradigm with its hidden dynamic racial profiling for critical modalities of witnessing trauma, violence, and loss? How might visual and new media studies, as well as art history and practice, sharpen our focus on technologies and aesthetics of re-presentation (photography) and em-bodiment (taxidermy, memes) involved in witnessing the corpse, drawing out a more expansive consideration of the role of images and digital networks in the circulation, proliferation and affective augmentation of dead bodies.
The PSL will climax on the final day with the hosting of a public “death cafe,” that will be designed by the PSL4 cohort. By staging an encounter among unlikely conversants regarding our most shared -- yet most ‘secret’ and intimate -- topic, we aim to bridge the gaps among scholarly discourse, personal experience and local knowledge. Further, we hope to create space for critical and substantive reflection regarding how we live with death and the dead, take responsibility for the death of the precarious Other and confront the fact of our own deaths: issues, ultimately, of profound ethical, political and cultural import for how we live today -- and together.