This project convenes an interdisciplinary, transnational group of scholars, students, and artists to rethink how we study the political economy of death in and around the Global South.
This new research collaborative is thus dedicated to interrogating classic concerns of political economy in global flows of bodies, labor, and capital, as well as the emotional and aesthetic underbellies of these processes. In this way we bring questions of cultural value, visuality, art, and desire to bear on how death is represented and consumed in global society.
Centrally, our research asks: How do bodies transgress the frames that construe them as exchangeable objects in global economies and imaginaries (Hong and Ferguson 2011; Thi Nguyen 2012)? How can we critically reimagine bodies, particularly the excesses and hauntings which characterize racialized death, in order to understand, respect, and amplify these transgressions (Million 2013; Hartman 1997)? With what consequence for racialized life today?
Recent Events
Roderick Ferguson, "The Economies of the Sea: Race, Labor, Migration and Visual Culture," April 21, 2021
Marta Elena Savigliano, "Corporealities (Un)limited: Edgy Meditations on Ghost Dancing, War Writing," UCLA and UC Riverside, November 22, 2019
A Dance Presentation by Susarita Loravianti, Minangkabau Indigenous Choreographer; Interim Vice President of the Institute of the Arts Padang Panjang, Sunatra, Indonesia, November 22, 2019