The Transnational Lives of Dead Bodies (Co-sponsored by Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section)

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This joint session between the Global and Transnational Sociology and Body and Embodiment sections examines the critical intersections of death, bodies, and transnational mobility. Death is a deeply social, cultural, and political process that influences how bodies are cared for, mourned, and governed in various contexts. It reveals how bodies are embedded in systems of power and inequality, determining who is considered grievable, how they are mourned, and how remains become politicized. The movement of the living and the dead across borders, the regulation of corpses, and the uneven distribution of premature death all warrant sociological examination.

The questions guiding this session include: What racial and gendered logics influence the creation of premature death? What do biopolitics and necropolitics reveal about migration and racialized and gendered bodies? Through what social and political practices are the dead cared for? How are death rites creatively adapted in diasporic settings? How do dead bodies give rise to new forms of life, collectivity, and community?

Sub Unit

• Global and Transnational Sociology Section / The Transnational Lives of Dead Bodies (Co-sponsored by Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section)

Cosponsor

• Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section

Presider

• Ara Allene Francis, College of the Holy Cross

Individual Presentations

• Black-Adjacency and Biopower in the Vietnam Years - Kit Lam, University at Buffalo

• Figures into the afterlife: re-forming the dead migrant trans woman - Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, University of Connecticut

• Getting Over COVID: A Cross-National Comparison of Pandemic Press Coverage - Timothy Recuber, Smith College

• “In Ashes, Patriots Return Home”: The Transnational Lives and Deaths of South Korean Diasporic Cremains - Miliann Kang, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Session Organizer

• Ara Allene Francis, College of the Holy Cross