Death’s Social and Material Meaning beyond the Human

Jesse D. Peterson is Lecturer and Assistant Professor with the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork.Natashe Lemos Dekker is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University.Philip R. Olson is Associate Professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.

• Introduction - Jesse D. Peterson, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Philip R. OlsonPart I: Ontologies & Epistemologies 1. ‘Seeing for real’: Forensic Pathologists Testing the Demonstrative Power of Postmortem Imaging - Céline Schnegg, Séverine Rey, Alejandro Dominguez2. Death at a Planetary Scale: Mortality’s Materiality in the Context of the Anthropocene - Philip R. Olson3. Death in the Fields: Microbial ‘Destruction’ in Polluted Soils - Serena Zanzu4. Can the Baltic Sea Die? An Environmental Imaginary of a Dying Sea - Jesse D. PetersonPart II: Care & Remembrance5. Viral Flows and Immunological Gestures: Contagious and Dead Bodies in México and Ecuador during COVID-19 - Rosa Inés Padilla Yépez, Anne W. Johnson6. Advertising the Ancestors: Ghanaian Funeral Banners as Image Objects - Isabel Bredenbroker7. Dying Apart and Buried Together: COVID-19, Cemeteries, and Fears of Collective Burial - Samuel Holleran8. Spirit Mediums at the Margins: Materiality, Death, and Dying in Northern Zimbaabwee - Olga SiciliaPart III: Troubling Agencies9. Rehabilitate or Euthanize?: Biopolitics and Care in Seal Conservation - Doortje Hoerst10. Troubling Entanglements: Death, Loss and the Dead in and on Television - Bethan Michael-Fox11. Material Entanglements of the Corpse - Marc Trabsky and Jacinthe Flore12. The Dead Who Would be Trees and Mushrooms - Hannah Gould, Tamara Kohn, Michael Arnold, Allison FraserConcluding Discussion13. Beyond the Norms - Jesse D. Peterson, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Philip R. Olson

“A crucially important book that radically expands how we humans can and should consider the end-of-life. The editors shift conventional views on death and dying by including cross-species mortality alongside the destruction of the environment. This is an extremely urgent book to read right now.” John Troyer, University of Bath