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Call for Papers: 115^th AAA Annual Meeting  ‘Evidence, Accident, Discovery ‘ 16^th-20^th Nov. 2016, Minneapolis

“Living in the wake of death: new socialities of ageing”

Organisers: Laura Vermeulen (PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam), Natashe Lemos Dekker (PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam), Marije de Groot (PhD Candidate, University of Amsterdam).

Discussant: Prof. Anne Allison (Duke University)

With traditional structures of the family as a unit for both care and production undergoing radical change and increasing numbers of people living and dying alone, the event of death has started to shape individual’s imaginaries of life’s finitude in novel ways. In a response to the proliferation of discourses on active ageing, ‘real’ ageing in these imaginaries is increasingly barred to the position of an abject, of ageing without agency (Gilleard and Higgs 2015). Death in this context has entered people’s daily lives as an utmost feared event kept at bay by being with others, or as something lonely, carefully planned and longed for. In this panel we explore how these and other ways of imagining death affect what  it means for ageing individuals to be with and without others.

Both practices of keeping at bay and of planning for solitary death could be seen as an indication of processes of individualisation taking place in societies of late liberalism. Very often however, such practices spark off new forms of sociality. Interest groups arguing for euthanasia, class discussions on the topic of preparing for solitary death, or loose and informal gatherings of single living elderly people keeping an eye out for each other, all could be seen as an indication of such new forms of being together formed as responses to such imaginaries of death. Rather than ‘the end of the social’ these new forms of relating to others in the wake of death could point towards novel forms of sociality underway: be they socialities of connection or of ‘disconnection’ (Allison 2015).

Inspired by Anne Allison’s recent call to go beyond a focus on death and dying in and for themselves, papers in this panel draw on people’s imaginaries and practices explicitly or implicitly revolving around death as a means to consider processes of remaking sociality. Addressing it as ‘an aspect and possibility of life’ as such, the panel’s focus on death’s presence in people’s narratives and daily lives is to shed light on ‘emerging states of being differently human, with and without others’ (Allison 2015).

For this panel we welcome contributions engaging ethnographic material on practices and narratives of individuals who envelop death in their everyday life projects. How do ageing individuals engage death in their daily lives? What new forms of everyday and political sociality are generated in these processes? How are such processes implicated in practices of place-making?

Please send your 250 word abstract and title for your contribution to Laura Vermeulen ([log in to unmask] ), Natashe Lemos Dekker ([log in to unmask] ) or Marije de Groot ([log in to unmask] ) before Friday 18^th of March.

Thank you very much for thinking along and please share this abstract with others who may be interested!

Works cited:

• Higgs, P. & P. Gilleard (2015) Rethinking old age. Theorising the fourth age.  Palgrave Macmillan.
• Allison, A. (2015) “Proposition: The End of the Social?” Conference Paper, Annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Denver Co., 18^th-22^nd November, 2015.

 

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Laura Vermeulen 

PhD Candidate | Centre for Social Science and Global Health

Univeristy of Amsterdam | Nieuwe Achtergracht 166 C5.03 | 1018 WV Amsterdam
T: +31 (0)6 2024 8852 | E: [log in to unmask]