Overview

Abstract

There is a sustained western cultural fascination with death, dying, dead bodies and wounds that includes, but is not limited to film, television, artwork, music and literature making death one of the most fertile areas to conduct research. Yet, despite this prevalence of morbidity and death representation within everyday culture it remains overshadowed by the broader death studies research framework that focuses on policy and law - the practicalities of dealing with death, the dying and the dead. Through the topic of death, this symposium seeks to bring together research which is conducted across a range of disciplines but which is often swept to the edges of death studies due to its cultural nature. It seeks to provide a platform for researchers  to present and discuss their death edgework conducted in social science, the arts and humanities and contribute to the growing network of researchers engaging with death in unconventional ways.

09:30 - 17:30 Wednesday 2nd December 2015 - The Lakehouse, Heslington East Campus

Tea, coffee and lunch will be provided for free

Some small travel bursaries will be available for PG researchers - mention that you would like to be considered with your abstract submission 

Keynote

"A place for the dead?: socio-cultural approaches in death, dying and disposal - marginal or moving to the centre?"

Prof. Craig Young

This lecture will explore the contention of the symposium that "the broader death studies research framework focuses on policy and law - the practicalities of dealing with death, the dying and the dead" . It firstly examines research produced from a more socio-cultural perspective in Death Studies to consider its disciplinary place. It also explores related developments in other disciplines, particularly 'Deathscapes' in Cultural Geography, which have broadened investigations away from a policy and regulatory focus on death to the intersections of death, landscape, heritage, the everyday and memory. I then reflect upon a variety of contemporary encounters with corpses to reflect on how we might 'make a place' for them in contemporary social sciences' and humanities' perspectives. While there is an increase in interest in death, dying and disposal outside of the field of Death Studies, much of that work is fragmented and tends to theorise the dead as 'absent' or as an 'absent-presence'. The lecture will argue that the challenge for developing multi-disciplinary perspectives on the dead body is to engage with the increasing presence of them in contemporary society. Thus the focus needs to be shifted to notions of 'presence' and the social, cultural and political aspects of encounter. The lecture thus explores a range of such contemporary encounters in different contexts, exploring themes of materialities, mobilities, ethics and politics and how these encounters are increasingly mediated and shaped  and enabled by technologies. While all this still has practical implications it also raises challenges and opportunities for approaches which are more informed by socio-cultural understandings of death, bodily disposal and the dead.

Programme

Death Conference Programme (PDF , 56kb)

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Speakers

Karina Croucher, 'Continuing Bonds: Images of the dead

University of Bradford

Twitter: @KarinaKTC 

Karina is a Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Bradford. She researches mortuary archaeology, particularly in prehistory, and is author of Death and Dying in the Neolithic Near East (OUP 2012). She is the PI on an AHRC-funded project, Continuing Bonds: Exploring the meaning and legacy of death through  past and contemporary practice, which explores the use of archaeology in training medical professions.

Miruna Cuzman 'Thwarted Pastoral - The Aesthetics of Death in William Orpen's War Pictures'

The University of Edinburgh

Miruna Cuzman received her PhD degree in the History of Art from the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral thesis focused on the painter of Irish extraction, William Orpen, investigating his artistic production during the later stages of the First World War. Miruna completed her MA in the History of Victorian Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and was visiting lecturer with the Philosophy Department at the National University of Ireland, Galway – her series of lectures focused on the ethics of visually representing First World War atrocities. Her research centers on the Aesthetic Movement in Victorian art, British Impressionism in the last decade of the nineteenth century and British art during the First World War. She has published peerreviewed

articles and reviews in both German and English in Das Schopenhauer Jahrbuch, The

Art Book and Art History. At present, she continues tutoring students in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh.

Danai Konstanta, Death commemoration through food rituals in contemporary Greece as a multi/inter-sensorial experience against the Greek, private and public, decadence

Goldmsith, University of London

My background is rather multi-disciplinary, as I hold a BA in Law (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) and on top of that I also hold a BA in Design (Technological Educational Institute of Athens, Greece) and a MA in Design (MA in Design Studies, Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London, UK). 

I am currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Cultural Studies, at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

I have always been interested in the choreography and the potentialities of the everyday  experiences which I tried to investigate through my artistic practise (via the media of video performances), through my professional practise (as a conceptual designer and design tutor) and finally, through my academic practise (MA thesis “Different hypostatisations of the same thing or the life within things/ourselves”, PhD research where I am trying to explore the potentialities of connecting food as ephemeral, multi/inter-sensorial performance and ritual with death, through the notion and praxis of design) .

Ellie Mackin,  'Death-Brides in Early Greece'

King’s College London

Website: elliemackin.net

Twitter: @elliemackin

Dr Ellie Mackin is a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies and a Teaching Fellow at King’s College London. Her research focuses on early Greek religion, and she is currently working on a monograph titled ‘Underworld Gods in Early Greek Religion’, based on her doctoral work which was completed at King’s College London in 2015. She is predominantly interested in the way that real people experienced religion in the ancient world and future plans include work on individual religious behaviour and community belonging.

Romany Reagan, 'Death & Eroticism: The Darker Side of Desire?' 

Royal Holloway, University of London

Website : http://abneyrambles.com/ 

Twitter : @msromany @abneyrambles

Romany Reagan is a practice-based PhD candidate in drama at Royal Holloway, University of London, specialising in performing heritage. Her audio walking practice takes place in Abney Park Cemetery in London, which is the site of her research on performing heritage and artistic interactions with heritage sites. Areas of interest encompass: mourning practices, 'the good death', anachronistic space, theatre archaeology, archives, heterotopias, gothic sensibility, liminal spaces, nonhuman heritage, the uncanny and the Victorian ‘cult of the dead’.

Judith Simpson,  'New clothes for the afterlife?' 

University of Leeds

Twitter: @shroudandveil 

I have a BA in Archaeology and Theology and an MA in Cultural Studies. I have been interested in death rituals and memorial practice since childhood and am currently preparing a PhD thesis which looks at the role played by clothing in contemporary death ritual.  I argue that, far from being a trivial concern, clothing is a crucial mechanism for sustaining both memories of the dead and a sense of communal identity: it is a way of making our beliefs and relationships tangible.

Lucy Talbot, Baby, I'm the walking dead: Psychobilly & the Dance of Death

Website www.deadmaidens.com

Twitter: @lucyctalbot

Lucy has a Masters of Art in Death, Religion & Culture and is co-founder of Death & the Maiden, a blog that explores the relationship between women and death. The website regularly features academics, authors, artists and practitioners sharing their research and experiences on a range of topics within the theme. Access to the Crime Museum in 2011 (famously known as the Black Museum) gave Lucy a unique opportunity to carry out field research in a private space outside the public domain, looking at objects of evidence from some of London’s most notorious crimes dating back to the Victorian era. She has given talks on a range of subjects such as memorial tattoos, the representation of the dead and dying body in horror films and her favourite film of all time, Harold and Maude. This year Lucy worked with funeral florist specialists Stems UK in developing a new range of sympathy bouquets, all of which find inspiration in poetry, lyrics and paintings. 

Carla Valentine, Dead Inside: Female Necrophilia, UK Law andThe Penetration Paradox

Birbeck, University of London

Website : www.thechickandthedead.com

Twitter : @ChickAndTheDead

Carla Valentine is technical curator of Barts Pathology Museum in London, a Victorian medical museum which houses over 5000 human remains. Prior to that she was a Senior APT or mortuary technician, assisting pathologists with autopsies for over eight years. She studied Forensic and Biomolecular Science at undergraduate level, then Forensic Anthropology,  and is now working on her MA in Museum Cultures with a focus on exhibiting the body. Her dissertation is entitled “The Taboo View: Medical Museums, Anatomical Display and the Sexualised Gaze” and her research involves all aspects of sex and its relationship to death. As a result she blogs about sex and death on her site The Chick and the Dead and runs a dating site for death professionals called Dead Meet.

Kerry Jones, Visual and Virtual Memorialisation Following Perinatal Death

University of Exeter Medical School

Kerry is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter Medical School focusing specifically on death and dying across the life course (neo natal, paediatric, dementia, traumatic brain injury and frail older) and lectures in death dying and bereavement and Medical Sociology on the Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery at the medical school. Recent research endeavours have included working alongside consultants on the challenges in initiating conversations on end of life care.  Having provided therapeutic support in a number of places of death (hospice, community, care homes), Kerry has harnessed these experiences and alongside research, continues to develop her consultancy further in providing training for allied health professionals involved with death, dying and end of life care. Kerry is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, BSA Medical Sociology Group, BSA Human Reproductive Group, Post Partum International and SANDS (Stillbirth and Neo natal Death Society

Abstracts

Panel 1 - Death and Consumption 

New clothes for the afterlife?

Judith Simpson, School of Design, University of Leeds

At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain had a thriving industry which produced gowns and shrouds for the dead in this country and beyond. By the end of the century the industry had all but collapsed, with around 9 out of 10 British corpses wearing their own “street” clothes in the coffin.  This has been attributed to the industry’s failure to develop and diversify the product range in line with consumer expectations, but I contend that there is much more involved than industrial inertia. Recently, several designers and companies have introduced biodegradable and hand-made grave-clothes in an attempt to reverse the industry’s decline, but uptake has been disappointing.  This paper argues that the styling and dressing of the dead body supports a desire to demonstrate that the deceased achieved a “good death” and to imaginatively align them with “heroic” cultural archetypes.  In creating such a visual statement the mourners (or their agents) effectively transform the deceased into an ancestor and re-validate the social arrangements of the group.  It follows that the grave-clothes market will only be revived when products are introduced which are able to communicate shared cultural ideals in a way that shrouds and simple gowns no longer can.

Being, buying and dying: consumption experiences towards the end of life

Prof Stephanie O’Donohoe, University of Edinburgh Business School

Prof Darach Turley, Dublin City University Business School

In Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) argues that ‘dasein’, or human being-in-the-world, is infused with the ever-present possibility of death, to the extent that being is fundamentally being-towards-death. For those diagnosed with a terminal illness, the sense of being-towards-death is heightened and inescapable. At the same time, many terminally ill people are busy being in the world; they  strive to maintain their sense of self and their engagement with the people, routines and things that have mattered to them. As their illness progresses, however, the erosion of physical and emotional energy may lead those who are dying  to refine their sense of self and their views about what matters, who matters, and why.   

In this paper, we draw on several pathographies - book-length accounts of terminal illness - to explore the role of things and consumer culture in  these authors’ lives as they move towards death. For Arthur Frank (1995), “[t]he ill person who turns illness into story transforms fate into experience”.  We examine the role of consumption objects and practices in the stories dying people tell themselves and others about who they are, what they are experiencing, and what they value. We discuss how those with terminal illness use goods to highlight, or even create, continuities between past and present selves; to weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life and modulate relationships with family and friends;  to maintain a sense of control in the face of change; and even to acknowledge and accommodate change as they move closer to death.  We explore how pathographies play an important role for writers – and  readers -  in being-towards-death within consumer culture, not least at a time when religious framing of death is less prevalent.  

Heidegger, M. (1962 [1927]) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E.S.  Robinson, New York: Harper & Row

Frank, A. (1995) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics, Chicago: Chicago University Press

Panel 2: Connecting the living and the dead 

Continuing Bonds: Images of the dead

Dr Karina Croucher, Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Bradford

This paper introduces a new collaborative project between archaeology and palliative care, where one aspect of our research will be ‘images of the dead’, focusing on the role that images of the dead can play in grief and mourning, reinforcing ‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead. As well as a brief consideration of modern thoughts on images of the dead, the paper will also consider ancient practices, most notably, the plastering of skulls from the Neolithic of Southwest Asia, where faces would be recreated onto the skulls of the dead using mud, lime or gypsum plasters; these would be displayed and used in the household. Does such practice indicate status and hierarchy, as has been traditionally argued by archaeologists, or is the use of the dead in this way an attempt to keep the dead close to the living?

Death-Brides in Early Greece

Dr Ellie Mackin, Institute of Classical Studies, King’s College London

Myrrhinous, near Athens, around 540 BCE. A girl, Phrasikleia, dies before she is old enough to be someone’s bride. On her grave, a statue of a kore (‘maiden’) is placed. It is inscribed:

The tomb of Phrasikleia, I shall be called maiden forever, 

Because I won this name from the gods instead of marriage

She was, probably, buried as a bride. She was given grave gifts that were more usually the gifts of weddings. Her funeral was a substitute for her marriage rites.

In Greek myth, too, girls who die before reaching marriageable age become brides in death, but these girls sometimes also become Brides of Hades, Lord of the Dead. In this paper, I will trace the phenomenon of ‘marrying off’ girls to d/Death in early Greece. I will look at the ways that death becomes a substitute ‘rite-of-passage’ and how this is constructed both mythically and in the ritual practices of families whose daughters die before marriage. I will link this to religious practices that are celebrated before real weddings, and how death-related iconography is incorporated into pre-marriage celebrations in some parts of the Greek world.

Ultimately, this paper aims to comment on the delicate balance between life and death, and the way that death is understood, used, and played with in early Greece. It will reveal an underlying unease about unusual deaths, which need to be veiled by a celebration of life and its perpetuation.

Panel 3: Bereavement and Memorialisation 

Visual and Virtual Memorialisation Following Perinatal Death

Dr Kerry Jones, University of Exeter Medical School

In this paper, I discuss parents’ accounts of personifying and memorialising their child in their everyday lives and on the web. As an extension of a real world memorial such as a gravesite, a virtual mourning space provides a space for personal narratives that otherwise are not socially or legitimately endorsed by the social networks to which bereaved parents have related.  Virtual mourning sites, thus, provide a space and location for narration about a deceased child and with it a sense of community building.

Following from research conducted with 30 bereaved parents following the death of their child following neonatal death or stillbirth, parental accounts of their grief suggests that the development of memorialisation sites provide for a period of intensive activity in which time would otherwise be spent in isolation for some parents. Such sites provided meaning and critical pieces of evidence that the baby existed.

Choosing to construct an online memorial website has the potential to serve solitary and social needs. Sites are constructed in isolation which is then accessed by increasing numbers who may provide comments which initiates a sense of community building. As Goffman (1963) points out, stigmatized individuals are motivated to bond with others.

The internet then is a valuable outreach tool for many bereaved parents providing for relief from isolation enabling them to find others such as their selves. Unlike physical memorials which are erected in one point in time and by and large remain unchanged, the interactive and communicative nature of the internet means online content can be amended and added to in subsequent periods of memorialisation which fits with parents biography of their child which changes over the life course as parents decide to tell which aspects of the story get told and in what way.

Death commemoration through food rituals in contemporary Greece as a multi/inter-sensorial experience against the Greek, private and public, decadence

Danai Konstanta, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

The proposed paper is part of my research’s ethnographic section. It is based on the fieldwork that I have undertaken in Greece.

It is dealing with the aspect of death rituals of commemoration, and especially food rituals as part of a rather sensorial encounter of our need to express our inner feelings, soothe our pain and think/remember/forget the deceased.

In my research I am trying to explore the potentialities of connecting food as ephemeral, multi/intersensorial performance and ritual of death, through the notion and praxis of design.

There are several reasons for choosing food as the medium of design’s performance. Food is an everyday choreography and a truly humane gesture with a dual character, private and public. It has been considered as the ultimate praxis of exchange. There can be found an extremely rich symbolic alphabet within the culture of preparation and consumption of food, while at the same time, food appears to be a crucial social matter directly related to wellbeing, economics, politics and the overall hyper-commodification of our lives. Though primarily being a bodily moderated process, food attributes roles, even identities.

Nevertheless, nowadays food rituals seem to have been marginalised and ‘condemned’ into the folkloric aspect of every culture which does not seem to have any influence on people any more.

During my fieldwork I tried to check food’s influence on people in the case of death through a sensorial approach.

The outcome came to be like a sensorial basic manifesto against the specific country’s, Greece, proximate financial and social collapse, a plea for resistance and regeneration.

Panel 4: Death Imagery

Thwarted Pastoral – The Aesthetics of Death in William Orpen’s War Pictures

Miruna Cuzman, History of Art, The University of Edinburgh

Damaged terrain, plundered houses and a No Man’s Land pockmarked by craters were stock images viewers became accustomed to seeing during the years of the First World War. Whereas these emblems of destruction were immortalised by war photography, there were not many painters bold enough to approach the topic of war casualties in a manner which went beyond pictorial, social, cultural and political conventions. Painters commissioned by the British Government, in particular, were hard put to capture the essence of war, while at the same time avoiding what lurked behind wartime visual representation – the imminence of death.

William Orpen, a distinguished society portraitist in pre-war London, was one of the few who while experiencing the war as a close observer, did not eschew death on the front. He chose to flaunt it in canvases which were at first sight masterfully executed and chromatically brilliant works characteristic of the British pastoral tradition. Orpen’s interest in the picturesque in an altered, inverted form turned his sun-drenched landscapes into deceptive images, displaying a pervasive fascination with violent death, decomposing bodies and the incongruence between luscious fields and human skulls grinning through clumps of grass and dandelions.

By means of a selection of visual examples, this paper explores how Orpen utilised the device of the caesura, the sudden break between what viewers expected to see and what they were presented with, in order to represent the demise of human beings in its most repulsive and abject form. His images of body parts, torn military uniforms hanging by a few vertebrae, solitary crosses and inundated shell holes covering the horrors floating underneath are the topics explored in this paper, in an attempt to account for the artist’s ongoing appeal and his early twentieth-century celebration as a painter-visionary.

Baby, I’m the walking dead: Psychobilly & the Dance of Death

Lucy Talbot, Independent Academic, blogger

From brands like “Living Dead Girl” to bands like the “Koffin Kats” you don’t have to look far into Psychobilly sub-culture to find references to death. The emergence of this music scene in the 1980s is commonly defined as the meeting of punk rock and rockabilly music. Lyrical inspiration comes from themes such as sexuality, science fiction, violence and horror genre. Known for catchy bass lines and comic style the presence of death is far from morbid or sombre at a Psychobilly show. Zombie style make up, jewellery shaped like bones and coffin styled instruments accompany upbeat music, sculpted hair and fast dancing.

This talk will explore the presence of death within Psychobilly through photographs and artwork, with particular attention to the adoption of Mexican iconography. Contemplating why “Day of the Dead” imagery has become a popular choice for tattoos, clothing, and band art within this community. From exploring this Mexican celebration conclusions will be drawn as to the roots of death in the Psychobilly movement, uncovering a modern day “dance macabre” within this fascinating music scene. 

Panel 5: Sex and Death 

Death & Eroticism: The Darker Side of Desire

Romany Reagan, Department of Drama, Royal Holloway, University of London

From medieval Death and the Maiden imagery to the modern cemetery as an after-hours sex den, the link between sexual arousal and death has been a long-noted aspect of the human sex drive. Far from being relegated to the outer fringes of necrosadism, the sexual thrill of flirting with death and danger has been explored and analysed from political, psychological and medical angles. The very act of confronting death sends up a primal drive to reassert life in the form of virile sexual expression. This impulse is commonly thought to manifest exclusively in the psychopathy of deviants, but sexual arousal in response to death imagery and near death experiences is actually an impulse based on affirmation of life, rather than a desire for death. This talk will explore this darker side of desire through the works of Foucault, Berscheid & Walster, Bataille, the Victorian post-execution autopsies of Dr Croker King and personal research in Abney Park Cemetery.

Dead Inside: Female Necrophilia, UK Law andThe Penetration Paradox

Carla Valentine, Birbeck, University of London & Barts Pathology Museum Curator

In the UK, necrophilia in general is more likely to be carried out in smaller funeral homes rather than hospital or coronial mortuaries as the latter are equipped with security cameras and closed-circuit television (CCTV). Female necrophilia is particularly infrequent in case histories but it does occur despite misconceptions as to how the act itself is accomplished.

This essay will give a short history of female necrophilia in both fact and fiction then attempt to illustrate that archaic heteronormative sexual stereotypes, in addition to the categorisation of necrophilia as a predominantly male deviancy, have created a loophole in UK law for female necrophiles.