Death & Culture IV

The Death & Culture Network (DaCNet) based at the University of York is pleased to invite you to Death & Culture IV, the fourth iteration of its biennial conference – hosted by York St John University.

Founded in 2016, DaCNet seeks to explore and understand cultural responses to mortality. It focuses on the impact of death and the dead on culture, and the way in which they have shaped human behaviour, evidenced through thought, action, production and expression. The network is committed to promoting and producing an inter-disciplinary study of mortality supported by evidence and framed by theoretical engagement.

This internationally reaching conference will bring together death scholars, including postgraduate students, artists, the charity sector, the professional environment, as well as those who might not consider themselves death scholars whose work overlaps with thanatological enquiry.

Death & Culture IV promotes the continuing engagement with the study of death, and acts as a forum for networking and the sharing of multidisciplinary death scholarship. We welcome contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Death and the popular imagination

• COVID-19

• Work in death and death-adjacent industries

• Governance of mortality

• Death in the digital age

• Mass death in the age of individualism

• Artistic approaches to mortality

Abstracts of no more than 2,500 characters should be submitted to the online portal by no later than 31 March 2022.