Please note: This event took place in July 2021
In this week's Lunchtime Talk, Dr John Troyer, Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath will explore how we negotiate the politics of memorialisation for the dead. Dr Troyer's interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialization practices, postmortem bioethics, and the dead body’s relationship with technology.
This is not a new question but it has a new urgency given the ongoing death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and all the individuals grieving these deaths.
Dr Troyer asks “How do we living humans negotiate the politics of memorialisation for the dead? They will also be looking into the term 'technology of memory', asking “how does the dead body function as a technology of memory in and around monuments and memorials?”
Dr Troyer suggests that it is the production of cultural memory “…through objects, images, and representations,” that is taken from Marita Sturken’s writing about sites such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.