From Avril Maddell:
CFP: AAG Annual Meeting, New Orleans, USA, April 10-14, 2018
For whom and what do we grieve? The spaces and politics of diverse experiences of death, loss and remembrance
The idea of Deathscapes is not limited to landscapes associated with death, but in a wider sense includes the spatial dimensions and relations situating and contextualising dying, death, bereavement and remembrance. Politics are at the core of these geographies of death, dying, grieving and memorialisation (see Johnson 1994; Sidaway 2009; Maddrell 2010; Wagner 2010; Stevenson et al 2016), in both everyday and extraordinary circumstances. Local and national governments act as key providers of cemeteries and crematoria in some countries. The state directs key public bodies such as the military, border security and police, and services such as public housing, schools and prisons; they also commission, regulate and curate public memorials. Likewise, public housing, welfare regimes and immigration policy impact on the experience of living-dying and bereavement. This applies to groups marginalised by monolithic and intersectional exclusion from power (e.g. see Morin 2016 on racialized carceral death). Also, as the Mediterranean Missing Migrants Project, #BlackLivesMatter and events in Charlottesville, USA testify, it applies to the politics of who is deemed ‘grievable’ in Butler’s (2009) terms, as well as who is publicly remembered, how, where and when – and at what cost? The politics and political processes surrounding death and remembrance, how these intersect with bodies, lives, communities and socio-cultural differences merit further examination in Geographical and wider analyses.
We welcome the submission of conceptual, empirical, creative and methodological papers form the Global ‘North’ or ‘South’, which explore the varied and intersectional political dimensions of embodied, individual, collective and institutionalised death, dying, loss and remembrance through a spatial lens.
Papers could address, but are not limited to:
- intersectional embodied, gendered, classed and ethnic geographies of death, loss, remembrance
- the geopolitics of migration deathscapes
- cemetery and crematoria needs in multi-cultural societies
- contested memorialisation in public places
- the political lives of the dying/dead/ commemorated
- death and remembrance in poverty/austerity
- carceral deathscapes
Session organizers:
- Yasminah Beebeejaun (UCL, UK)
- Avril Maddrell (Reading, UK)
- Danny McNally (Reading, UK)
- Brenda Mathijssen (Reading, UK)
Please send titles and abstracts (no more than 250 words) to Danny McNally (D.mcnally@reading.ac.uk) or Brenda Mathijssen (b.mathijssen@reading.ac.uk) by Friday October 6th 2017.
Path to the Possible 