Deadline: July 19, 2019

Despite the wide variety of events studied or addressed by event scholars and event managers, very few consider death from a perspective of event studies or event management. Yet, it is the one event that none of us can evade. How death is articulated through the events around it, how the end of life is marked (whether that be the life of an individual, a group, or a community) through evental structures in diverse cultural, ideological, societal frameworks, is a vastly under-explored domain. From the practicalities around a highly stage-managed event of commemoration or memorialisation, in the details of state funeral or day of remembrance, to the sudden outpourings of grief and unstructured informal societal responses to some events of death around well-known figures, the loss of someone personally close to us or our responses shed light on culturally normative modes of expression, hegemonic power, or an ideological context within which the death occurs and the living act and interact.

Following on from a positive discussion with one of the editorial board of the Emerald Studies in Death and Culture book series we are looking for chapters that would contribute to a proposed book on death, remembrance, memorialisation and the evental. We seek contributors from any discipline and field who are interested in reflecting on death from the perspective of event, event studies, and events management. The work can be conceptual, empirical, practical or provocative. Whether you are a practitioner or your area of expertise is anthropology, critical event studies, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, theology or otherwise, so long as your interest is in the manifestation, mediation and articulation of death from an events perspective, we would love to hear from you. There are no restrictions around conceptual framework, or on the research philosophy/research approach, your work adopts.

Chapters may cover, but not be limited to:

• Celebrating, commemorating and memorialising death through events
• Funerals and memorial services
• Funeral directors as event manager and co-creators of funeral events
• National or international commemorations of death
• Deaths of celebrities, royalty, religious or political leaders or iconic figures
• Formal state responses to death
• Media influences on death
• Commercialization of death
• Cultural significance of death memorials
• Vigils and responses to terror attacks
• Faith and non-faith perspectives
• Informal spontaneous evental responses to death
• Cultural appropriation of death events
• Teaching about events of death
• Conspicuous consumption and death
• Sustainability and woodland burials
• Visual media, social media and memorabilia, live streaming of death events
• (Auto)Ethnographic stories of death events
• Memorialisation as activist event
• Theological perspectives on death events
• A contemporary conceptualization of the funeral as event
• Rituals of death events
• Death events as liminal spaces

In the first instance please send us an abstract of 300 words (excluding any references), together with your full name, any affiliation, and lead author contact information until 19th July 2019. Our objective is to submit a formal book proposal by the end of July 2019.

Dr Ian R Lamond: i.lamond@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

Rev. Ruth Dowson: r.dowson@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

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