Dr Claire Moon

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics, MSc in Inequalities and Social Science, MSc in International Migration and Public Policy, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement. Priority will be given to students who have this course listed in their programme regulations. This may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

It is said that death is ‘the great leveller’. However, this course will challenge that truism by exploring the various ways in which death is not the moment at which social and political inequality is erased but is instead perpetuated by the varied and differential treatment of the corpse. As such, the course takes the corpse as the lens through which several critical social and political issues might be examined. It spans various social and political engagements with the dead, covering the ways in which they are regarded, treated, mourned (or not), disposed of, memorialised, venerated, exhumed, remembered, and forgotten.

The issues explored in this course are anchored by a set of key questions: What is the social and political significance of the dead body? What is the nature of the relationship between the living and the dead? How do grief and mourning tie the living and dead together? What forms of labour do the dead demand?  What do the dead, and the ways in which treat them, tell us about social life? What are the political ‘uses’ of the dead? How are social inequalities reproduced in the treatment of the dead? What do we owe the dead?

The course will introduce students to a range of social and political issues related to the dead as well as theoretical frameworks for understanding their agency and social power.

The list of topics covered by the course is not intended to be exhaustive - this is a wide field - but are likely to be selected from the following: the corpse, the cemetery, death work, loss, grief and mourning, necropolitics, the stigmatised dead, necro-waste, exhibiting the dead, dead body parts (commodification, circulation, capitalism), the politics of exhumation, memorialisation, the dead body and human rights.

Students will encounter a range of literature and debates from different disciplinary perspectives, including sociology, history, politics, anthropology, science and technology and philosophy, to reflect upon and interpret the profound significance of the dead to social and political life.

30 hours of seminars in the AT.

Core teaching will be delivered across 10 weeks in the AT with a reading week in Week 6, in line with Departmental policy.

The reading week will be used for reading and preparation of the summative essay plan, due for submission in Week 7 of the course.

Active participation in seminars in the form of contributions to discussion, group work and short presentations is expected.

• Amanik, Allan and Kami Fletcher (2020) Till Death Us Do Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
• De Leon, Jason (2015) Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland, California: University of California Press.
• Laqueur, Thomas (2015) The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. New Jersey, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Mbembe, Achille (2016) Necropolitics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Quigley, Christine (1996) The Corpse: A History. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company.
• Redman, Samuel (2016) Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Rojas-Perez, Isaias (2017) Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
• Scheper-Hughes, Nancy (1992) Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Verdery, Katherine (1999) The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Timmermans, Stefan (2006) Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
• Winter, Jay (2014) Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A longer reading list will be provided to students on enrolment in the course.

Essay (90%, 4000 words) in the WT Week 1.
Essay plan (10%) in the AT Week 7.

The course is assessed in the following ways:

10% will be awarded for the essay plan, due in Week 7 which will form the foundation of the final summative, and 90% for one 4,000-word essay due in the first week of the WT.

Students will receive feedback from their essay plan to help them in the development of their final essay.

An electronic copy of the assessed essay plan, to be uploaded to Moodle, no later than 4.00pm on the Thursday of week 7 of Autumn Term.

An electronic copy of the assessed essay, to be uploaded to Moodle, no later than 4.00pm on the Thursday of week 1 of Winter Term.