Notice Board

University of Lethbridge Women Scholars’ Speakers Series Presents: "Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab" with Dr. Tara Mehrabi, Karlstad University, Sweden

November 16, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. MST (via Zoom)

Bringing together a multitude of insights and perspectives on death, dying and grief feels all the more urgent in this time of Covid-19.

We have invited researchers, artists, and educators to discuss various topics including Blackfoot perspectives on death and dying, the queer materiality of death, how animals grieve, ecological approaches to death and dying, and death in popular culture & performance. 

Link to webinar; no registration is required. 

https://uleth.zoom.us/j/91338149041

Abstract: I start by introducing the Queer Death Studies Network and the contribution of the collective in rethinking death, dying and mourning. I will then proceed to present parts of my project that is situated within the network’s research initiative to queer ecologies of death. Relying on my ethnographic material collected from one year of participatory observation in an Alzheimer’s laboratory in Sweden, I explore queer ecologies of death in the lab as a material-discursive phenomenon. On the one hand, I discuss how heteronormative and humanistic ideologies about “purity” and “pure Nature” shape the space of the laboratory and regulate waste management practices. On the other hand I present how the materiality of the living and dead matter problematize such fantasies of purity and prescribed categories of laboratory waste. I argue that thinking with queer ecologies of death exposes the multi-relational and always mediated ontologies of nature and blurs the boundaries between life and death.

Bio: I a​m a senior lecturer in gender studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. My research interests are on matters of death and dying; gender, health and technology; as well as feminist technoscience studies.  My dissertation, Making Death Matter (2016) was an exploration of processes and practices through which death is materialized and becomes meaningful in the context of Alzheimer’s science. How different bodies become killable differently in the science economy of the lab and are exposed as waste. In my postdoc research at Turku University, Finland (2018), I explored death and waste management practices in the lab further so to contribute to the theorizing nature, life and death as interconnected and in terms of queer ecologies of death. I am one of the founding members of the Queer Death Studies Network and a member of posthumanities hub in Sweden. My current research is taking me on a new path that is matters of accessibility and equality in times of digitalization of health care in Sweden from a feminist new materialist perspective