Primo annuncio di un appuntamento importante per chi si occupa del rapporto tra corpo e società.

Il Centre for Death and Society (CDAS) organizza un convegno interdisciplinare su La mercificazione della morte, il corpo morto e il lutto. L’appuntamento è per il 29-30 giugno 2013 a Bath (UK). Gli abstract delle proposte (fino a 250 parole) devono essere inviati a cdas@bath.ac.uk entro l’11 Marzo 2013.

Diamo qui la prima presentazione del convegno. Altri particolari e update in http://www.bath.ac.uk/cdas/index.html. Il contatto è Caron Staley, Centre for Death & Society, Department of Social & Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, Tel: 01225 386949, Email: cdas@bath.ac.uk

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.