Centre for Death and Society Conference 2013

New Economies of Death: The Commodification of Dying, the Dead Body, and Bereavement

29-30 June 2013, Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institute, Bath

The 2013 CDAS conference will explore the constantly evolving relationship between commodification and human death.

Twenty-minute multidisciplinary papers are invited from social scientists and death studies researchers; scholars of culture, media and literature; bioethicists; economists; historians; health and care professionals; computer scientists; consumer advocates; funeral directors; and members of all relevant industries.

We are interested in papers and presentations that examine the commodity values (real, speculative, historical, and contemporary) attached to the following themes: • Physical and conceptual understandings of death • The dying process and care of the dying • Tissue Economies (Waldby and Mitchell, etc.) and the buying and selling of dead bodies, body parts and tissues • Cultural resistance to commodification in the market for human goods • Dead body donation for medical schools and anatomical research; the gift relationship • Organ markets, both government operated and blackmarket • Consumer costs for funerals, dying, and memorialisation • New critiques of capitalism and its relationship to death and dying as forms of labour • Future postmortem economies built around life extension • The capitalisation of digital spaces for memorialisation • The commodification of social networks, both real world and digital, that deal with death • Postmortem digital property rights and the next-of-kin relation • The Multitude (as discussed by Negri, Hardt, Casarino, etc.) as composed of both living and dead bodies • The aesthetic commodification of death, dying, and the dead body in film, literature, architecture, etc. • Media commodification of death and dying in television, print, and online • Political economies built around end of life care and the politics of death • Grief and bereavement as commodifiable human activities

Our aim is to bring together the fragmented research and knowledge in this area.

Abstracts (up to 250 words) to be emailed to cdas@bath.ac.uk by 11 March 2013.

Booking is now open for the Conference, just visit: http://store.bath.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?catid=21&modid=2&compid=1

Please check the CDAS website (www.bath.ac.uk/cdas), our Facebook page, or on Twitter (@cendeathsociety) for updates.