Short Abstract

This panel considers the fields of power at play in dying and death. We examine the political work of grieving as a site of regulation and contestation of necropolitics as it is implicitly woven into the everyday.

Long Abstract

This panel considers the fields of power at play in dying, death, and grief. Necropolitics, as the exercise of control through death, is often violent and disruptive, but can also take the form of implicit mechanisms woven into the ordinary—whether it is through state regulation and policies, capitalist development, algorithms and data, or through systemic exclusion and neglect.

In this panel, we are interested in how necropolitical contexts affect experiences and expressions of grief. On the one hand, this question explores the ways in which control and power become enmeshed with which lives are grieved and in what manner (Butler 2004). On the other hand, it addresses what might emerge when grief itself is politicized. How do (in)justice and (mis)recognition, as well as questions of accountability and responsibility become entangled with experiences of grief? How does formal and informal memorialization challenge necropolitical powers? And how does necropolitics affect the social fabric of continuing life in the face of death and dying?

We invite ethnographic and conceptual accounts on the regulation and contestation of death and grief understood as political sites, and which expose the relation between (state) power, dying, and grieving. Reflecting on these questions, we seek to unpack the political work that is done to challenge necropolitics, to demonstrate the forces, counterforces, and acts of care that shape responses to death and its aftermath.

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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