Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead

Critical studies of death (thanatology) have illuminated how human societies organize spaces of burial according to gender, race, class, sexual preference, and religion. Informed by these works “Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead” introduces how studies of death, especially of persons within groups excluded from systems of power in the living world, illuminate how the structures of power exceed life extending into the afterlives of the dead. Drawing upon a diverse array of research, this workshop will offer examples from Europe and the Middle East/North Africa. The conference will transgress traditional disciplinary and chronological boundaries in order to understand how the marginal dead were treated and placed across time and space. The workshop combines two recent concepts in the study of death and burial–necrogeographies and the marginal dead–to stimulate new research trajectories.

Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead are found within diverse urban settings, which is why the contributions focus on major cities such as London, Cordoba, Paris, and Istanbul. At the same time religious and confessional marginality is a defining feature of urban life, where different religious groups co-existed and interacted, sometimes involving the exclusion and marginalization of faith groups. The workshop, therefore, includes approaches of the DFG-funded research project “Religion and Urbanity”, especially that of co-spatiality, understood as the overlapping of different burial spaces within one city, and heterarchies, illustrative of urban power structures. Moreover, it engages with the topic of “group formation” through the treatment and placement of the dead, another important element in the project.