CfP: Special Issue: Critical South Asian Death Studies23.1.2026 {de}
The long twentieth century has been regarded variably as a ‘century of death’ (Radomska et. al., 2019; Ericksen, 2012). Marked by several thanatological ruptures – wars, colonialism, environmental degradation, and geopolitical turmoils – the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have witnessed a proliferation of academic literature inquiring experiences of death and mourning. Recent theories in Death Studies, which first took institutional roots in the 1970s, have been deeply concerned with the resonances of mortality, and their continued relevance in contexts of post/colonial capitalist extraction, climate crises, religious fundamentalism, symbolic violence, and global media dissemination. Yet, while much has been penned about the paradigms of death in the ‘Global North,’ there exists uneven temporalities in the academic reception of death, specifically in South Asian contexts. Death Studies as a discipline is widely conceived from within individualist, white Western hegemonies and through their appendant epistemologies that foreclose engagements with, among others, South Asian relationalities, belief systems, and established structures of mourning. Critical South Asian Death Studies situates itself in this gap, paying heed to critical approaches to death, dying, grieving and end-of-life care in South Asia.
Indeed, Radomska et al. (2020) argue that current discourses in Death Studies are “often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies.” (p. 81). Similarly, Thacker & Duran (2020) posit that theories that frequently underscore the study of death stem from “white-centric, individualized, Western ideals of typical grief and bereavement” (p. 1). Normative engagements in Death Studies have left a conspicuous gap characterised by the assumptions of subject, relationalities, belief systems, and established structures of mourning. The same, thus, necessitates the mobilisation of critical, intersectional, and radical contextualisms that emphasize distinct bio-medical, metaphorical, cultural, and social forms of death.
As such, this special issue situates itself within traditions of Critical South Asian Death Studies (CSADS), which operationalises such a lens to mark a departure from conventional death research and practice by centring the deep complexities of South Asia. Death, argues Wilson (2014), constitutes an integral moment of transition, both for the living and the dead, in different South Asian traditions. Particularly, performances of mortality simultaneously cater to the exercise of necropower, and exaction of necropolitics (Mbembe, 2003; see also Prakash & Kennedy, 2021). Coined by Mbembe in 2003, necropolitics refers to “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (p. 27). This becomes distinctly important in anthropocenic scenarios of planetary environmental degradation that transform certain landscapes into unlivable spaces, and certain lives into ‘un/grievable’ deaths (Butler, 2004; Radomska et. al 2019). CSADS, then, attends to, in a norm-critical manner, the necropolitical agendas that underlie the concerns of positionality in South Asia. It calls attention to the varied socio-cultural, economic, political, historical, ethical, ontological and epistemological aspects that underpin South Asianness, with a distinct resonance to experiences of ‘marginalisation.’ Not only so, but it also centres empowering narratives of postcolonial reclamations, subversive necropolitics, non-textual spaces, and oral histories. As such, CSADS attempts to go beyond disciplinary bounds, paying heed to chrono-, bio-, and life-normative structures.
However, in centring ‘South Asia’, we, the conference committee, are aware of the conceptual problems that characterise the term. In cognizance of the constantly shifting geographies of the region, it would be fallacious to read cultures to be coterminous with territories. Demonstratively, the territories of South Asian states are porous, with thousands of individuals crossing them every day. Given this, territorial spatialities are characterised by uneven, contradictory and multidirectional sets of beliefs, institutions and discourses. This is furthered by deterritorialising tendencies of the South Asian Diaspora that delinks notions of the home/land, physical geographies and, ‘ageing in place’ (Venkatasalu et al., 2013). Thus, we refrain from prescriptive delineation in broaching South Asia, instead acknowledging the creative, critical and complex ways bodies can inhabit South Asia, and South Asia can come to label spaces and processes.
Attuned to the varied articulations of death, we particularly invite contributions on the following lines, though this is not an exhaustive list:
- Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi perspectives on death and necropower
- Non-hegemonic Hindu and non-Brahmanic death rituals and practices
- Death, occupation, war, and conflict in South Asia
- Queer deaths and non-normative mourning
- COVID-19, invisible deaths, and illness
- Intersectional approaches (caste, class, gender, sexuality, religion, region, age)
- Thanatechnologies and changing practices of body disposal
- Perspectives from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Maldives, Myanmar, and Afghanistan
If we have piqued your interest, then please send your abstracts/proposals (approximately 300 words) to csads.muenster[at]gmail.com by the 15th of February, 2026 (11:59 PM CEST). You will be notified of the reviewing panel’s decision within 2-4 weeks of the deadline. Full papers for internal editorial feedback will be due by mid-May, 2026.
Source: Call for Paper- Special Issue: Critical South Asian Death Studies, H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US.
