This is a research interest which emerges from some of my ethnographic work in Taiwan, and is shared with Prof. Bob Simpson, who was my PhD supervisor. Under the umbrella of New Immortalities, we have run three events which develop ideas in this research thread.
February 2014 We invited colleagues a Durham based workshop, and arranged their topics along four panels:
- Therapeutics: transplantation donation and harvesting
- The social body at death
- Viewing the body: Education and spectacle
- Artificiality and Temporality: implants, clones and immortality
June 2014 Co-convened panel at the Association of Social Anthropologists Decennial conference in Edinburgh (#ASADecennial) to pick up New Immortalities again, this time grouping presentations into three “imaginaries”:
- Death and the social imaginary
- Death and the scientific imaginary
- Death and the environmental imaginary
Participants and abstracts can be viewed here.
June 2016 Co-convened panel at the Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Durham (#ASA2016Durham) – abstracts can be read here. A related panel on Decomposition, convened by colleagues Liz Hallam and Hannah Rumble is archived here.
With a mix of panel participants from these events, we are bringing together a special issue for the new open access journal Medical Anthropological Theory, forthcoming Spring 2017.