Overview
Death Activism introduces Death Studies through a queer, posthuman understanding of death in the anthropocene, contextualising death in a highly contemporary ethical way which addresses unjust death, dissymmetrical patterns of death, aesthetics and death, death and waste, nonhuman and environmental death, and the possibility of celebrating death as a posthuman practice, a way to negotiate purely anthropocentric ideas of death. Crucial to the foundation of death activism is the dissymmetry with which different deaths are met. As an ecological project this includes the mass death of nonhuman animals and ecologies. As a feminist, queer, postcolonialist enquiry, the outcomes seek to queer death – making queer our usual familiar death habits and trajectories of thought, toward a jubilant activism that can transform death into a more democratically equal, and a more jubilant force for life.
Speaker
Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published extensively on philosophy, feminism, queer and monster theory, animal abolitionist activism, ethics, art, occultism, and horror cinema. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Routledge 2008) and Posthuman Ethics (Routledge 2012) and the editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (EUP 2017), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2018). Her newest book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene. She recently completed a Leverhulme Fellowship researching and developing Death Activism.
Details
This is a hybrid event, which will take place in-person in the Gatsby Room (Chancellor's Centre) and also on Zoom.
If you would like to attend online, please register for the Zoom link.
Refreshments will be available for the in-person audience.
Access
This event will take place in Gatsby Room on the first floor of the Chancellor's Centre. It has step-free access with a lift and there is an accessible toilet located each floor of the building.
Wolfson Humanities Society
The Humanities Society organises regular talks spanning a wide range of topics which take place every Tuesday during term time - please sign up to their mailing list to keep up to date with their upcoming events.
