As political ecology challenges us to consider the power relations at the core of environmental experiences and contexts, how might we extend these discussions beyond the realm of the living? What, in other words, might a political ecology of death and dying look like? While much existing scholarship explores the practices and processes around death through the lens of human experience, in this panel we ask how a political ecology of death pushes us to think of more-than-human experiences and beings. These questions have a particular relevance at a time when human-caused environmental changes and climate catastrophe are producing new risks and hazards to life across species.

This session calls for papers that will explore the political ecology of death across multiple theoretical frameworks and in different topical contexts. Papers might examine how the unequal risks of pollution based on race and class, for example, lead to different understandings of life and death in global cities. Others might ask how communities understand, mitigate, or adapt to climate-related hazards when the survival of individuals and even entire communities are at stake. Participants could explore how rituals and rites of passage around death are shaped by environmental concerns and constraints, exploring how the spaces occupied by the dead shape the living. Papers might also discuss the role of grief around experiences or anticipation of losses related to climate change, including grief for the loss of more-than-human entities like glaciers, ecosystems, or other species. We welcome papers from disciplines across the social and humanistic sciences, seeking work that speaks to this topic from a variety of methodological approaches and theoretical positions.

Organizers: Angela Storey & Erin Kurtz

Please submit abstracts to Angela Storey at angela.storey@louisville.edu by 15 December 2023.

Modality: Hybrid