Conference on 'closure', 9-10 April 2025

Centre for Death and Life Studies is organising a conference on Closure

While bereavement-support, grief, and the loss of others, along with one’s own end of life concerns provide immediately obvious topics, this cross-disciplinary and international event will embrace ‘closure’ in other domains. Music, for example, concerns composition, delivery, and reception, often aligned with death. So, too, with literature, the power of narratives, poems, and biographies. Then, what might the making of pottery, ceramics, and memorials at large bring to our discussion? Moreover, assisted dying, at personal and social levels, as well as concerns relating to global warming, both raise existential, religious, and philosophical quandaries of their own as far as ‘closure’ is concerned. Such issues are also raised with practices of traditional and woodland burial, cremation (traditional and ‘direct’), alkaline hydrolysis and innovative organic modes of disposal. Furthermore, thinking through the lens of our Digital Death research raises questions concerning how digital and web-based interests relate to the offline lifeworld as far as death, grief, memory, remembrance are concerned. Despite this far-ranging set of topics, this event is determined to focus on ‘closure’ and is not an invitation to address ‘everything’ related to death. Accordingly, there will be a set of invited distinguished speakers representing fields mentioned above, offering 20-minute papers, sometimes in dialogue with each other, and an open invitation for closure-focused papers of 10 minutes. All talks are in a plenary context, and not parallel sessions, to provide everyone with a widely shared audience. The call for papers closed on 24th January 2025.

The conference partially marks the conclusion of the Digital Death Project in which Durham has shared research with the universities of Aarhus in Denmark, Helsinki in Finland, and Bucharest in Romania, all funded by the European Union’s Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe scheme (CHANSE).

Full programme

Link to LinkedIn post