You are warmly invited to an online Human Geography Research Cluster seminar on Thursday 13th March, 1pm- 1.50pm (Teams link for joining below).
Through a decolonising lens? Exploring the connections between ‘bereavement and grief’ and the climate and ecological emergencies.
Jane McCarthy, Honorary Associate, The Open University; Visiting Professor, Centre for Death and Society, Bath University; Visiting Fellow, University of Reading.
Abstract
The impact of the climate and ecological emergency creates a central threat regarding the polycrisis currently unfolding across the globe, rooted in colonial, capitalist, white, modernity. While many peoples across the world already experience catastrophic ‘losses’ of many kinds, the polycrisis gives rise to global issues of collective and individualised deaths, profound losses and endings of many kinds, raising existential threats to all life on earth. These are ’human’-made crises, though not made equally by all ‘humans’, requiring a sustained focus and concern, of and for the living, in both the anticipation and the aftermath of these deaths, losses, and endings. Yet, while death and bereavement studies as constructed in affluent Minority worlds has claimed an arrogant universality, the narrative and rhetoric of modernity is most profoundly challenged by human mortality. The Open University programme on Existential Dis/Connections aims to bring currently disparate bodies of work into connection, centring on our three core themes of death and loss, the CEE, and decolonisation. We seek to create new spaces for nurturing and embracing both epistemic and ontological justice, to enable a pluriverse of cosmologies, and ways of being and living alongside death, to be valued and heard through a decolonising lens that starts from ‘elsewhere’. Can death studies decentre the current dominant approaches rooted in modernity, to contribute towards an existential climate justice for the benefit all life and entities on earth?
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