Political Theory On Death And Dying

Political Theory on Death and Dying provides a comprehensive, encyclopedic review that compiles and curates the latest scholarship, research, and debates on the political and social implications of death and dying. Adopting an easy-to-follow chronological and multi-disciplinary approach on 45 canonical figures and thinkers, leading scholars from a diverse range of fields, including political science, philosophy, and English, discuss each thinker’s ethical and philosophical accounts on mortality and death. Each chapter focuses on a single established figure in political philosophy, as well as religious and literary thinkers, covering classical to contemporary thought on death. Through this approach, the chapters are designed to stand alone, allowing the reader to study every entry in isolation and with greater depth, as well as trace how thinkers are influenced by their predecessors. A key contribution to the field, Political Theory on Death and Dying provides an excellent overview for students and researchers who study philosophy of death, the history of political thought, and political philosophy.

Despite an abundance of violence occurring in political contexts, no liberal political theorist since Thomas Hobbes has talked directly and coherently about death. John E. Seery does. He contends that liberalism desperately needs a theoretical framework in which to discuss pressing matters of human mortality. Among the contemporary political issues that cry out for theoretical articulation, Seery suggests, are abortion politics, ethnic cleansing, suicide assistance, national reparations, environmental degradation, and capital punishment. Seery offers a new conception of social contract theory as a framework for confronting death issues. He urges us to look to an older tradition of descent into an underworld, wherein classic theorists consulted poetically with the dead and acquired from them political insight and direction.In this lively book, Seery excavates the infernal tradition by rereading the politics of death in Platonism, early Christianity, and contemporary feminism. Building on those traditions, he proposes a new, constructive image of death that can serve democratic theory productively. Reconsidered from the "land of the shades," social contractarian theory is sufficiently altered that, for example, a pro-life Christian and a pro-choice secularist might be able to strike common ground upon which to discuss abortion politics.

Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations brings together a diverse array of critical IR scholars, political theorists, critical security studies researchers, and critical geographers to provide a series of interventions on the topic of death and death-making in global politics. Contrary to most existing scholarship, this volume does not place the emphasis on traditional sources or large-scale configurations of power/force leading to death in IR. Instead, it details, theorizes, and challenges more mundane, perhaps banal, and often ordinary modalities of violence perpetrated against human lives and bodies, and often contributing to horrific instances of death and destruction. Concepts such as "slow death," "soft killing," "superfluous bodies," or "extra/ordinary" destruction/disappearance are brought to the fore by prominent voices in these fields alongside more junior creative thinkers to rethink the politics of life and death in the global polity away from dominant IR or political theory paradigms about power, force, and violence. The volume features chapters that offer thought-provoking reconsiderations of key concepts, theories, and practices about death and death-making along with other chapters that seek to challenge some of these concepts, theories, or practices in settings that include the Palestinian territories, Brazilian cities, displaced population flows from the Middle East, sites of immigration policing in North America, and spaces of welfare politics in Scandinavian states.

Chapter 12 of this book is open access under a CC BY license. Well-established scholars from a variety of disciplines - including sociology, anthropology, media and cultural studies, and political sciences – use the social construction of death and dying to analyse a wide variety of meaning-making practices in societal fields such as ethics, politics, media, medicine and family.

A physician's "provocative" (Boston Globe) and "timely" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times Book Review) account of how right-wing backlash policies have deadly consequences -- even for the white voters they promise to help. In election after election, conservative white Americans have embraced politicians who pledge to make their lives great again. But as physician Jonathan M. Metzl shows in Dying of Whiteness, the policies that result actually place white Americans at ever-greater risk of sickness and death. Interviewing a range of everyday Americans, Metzl examines how racial resentment has fueled progun laws in Missouri, resistance to the Affordable Care Act in Tennessee, and cuts to schools and social services in Kansas. He shows these policies' costs: increasing deaths by gun suicide, falling life expectancies, and rising dropout rates. Now updated with a new afterword, Dying of Whiteness demonstrates how much white America would benefit by emphasizing cooperation rather than chasing false promises of supremacy. Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award

Looking at the cultural responses to death and dying, this collection explores the emotional aspects that death provokes in humans, whether it is disgust, fear, awe, sadness, anger, or even joy. Whereas most studies of death and dying treat the subject from an objective viewpoint, the scholars in this collection recognize their inherent connection with death which allows for a new and more personal form of study. More broadly, this collection suggests a new paradigm in the study of death and dying.

This book is a multi-disciplinary collection of death and dying studies, including chapters on philosophy, media studies, health care, literature, and political science.

This book reflects on the variety of ways in which mourning affects political and social life. Through the narrative of the contributors, the book demonstrates how mourning is intertwined with politics and how politics involves a struggle over which losses and whose lives can, or should, be mourned.