Heather Latimer, University of British Columbia; Astrida Neimanis, University of British Columbia;
Covid-19, climate catastrophes, and new and resurgent forms of necropolitics have many of us grappling with untimely endings at personal, political and planetary scales. As one way to better understand these circumstances, this session explores the relationship between living and dying. We are interested in thinking through practices, theories and technologies that probe the edges of existing and expiring, whereby any secure delineation between life and death is troubled. Dialoguing with the conference's call to focus our consciousness on struggles over land, water and bodies, we will examine death in multispecies contexts, and encourage anticolonial understandings of Land and bodies, where life and death are also intergenerational, more-than-human, and more-than-biological.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
Decomposition, composting and regeneration (material and/or methodological);
Pregnancy, ectogenesis and abortion;
Multispecies palliation, necropsy;
Life support and death doulas;
Vibrant deaths and im/mortailty;
Extinction and de-extinction;
Cryogenesis, taxidermy and death on display;
Afterlives and after-life writing;
Killability, grievability, and necropolitics;
Antiracist, anticolonial and crip-queer animacies;
'Water is Life' and other lively elementals.
We welcome submissions from multiple perspectives, but will spotlight papers that bring creative, arts-based and humanities-oriented perspectives to STS concerns, in order to reimagine the nuances and possibilities of living with death. We especially invite papers that disrupt extractive research paradigms and consider care, reciprocity and justice.
