Anatomies of Grief: Conversations on an Ethics of Living

While there has been sustained discussion on grief in relation to illness, war, and death, what is at stake when we explore this affective landscape in relation to loss and sadness, which illuminate grief in the realm of the living?

Without abandoning the phenomena of individual and collective mourning in relation to ongoing historical events and atrocities, how might we tend to the deeper revelations that “grief” offers us? What are these revelations that reside beneath “grief” and what do they offer? What ethical engagements with “grief” enable a critique of modern conceptions of temporality, spatiality, and corporeality that often compel, if not demand, a linear engagement with loss, which assumes an expiration of this affective relation? What livable futures might we imagine if we embraced grief as a radical affective resource for change?

This online gathering hosted by Race, Ethics, and Power (REP) Project considers multiple interpretations of grief, while accounting for the situational, local, and transcultural contexts of its emergence.

★ This is an online event. It will be live streamed on the Centre for Ethics YouTube Channel on June 23 & 24, 2022. Channel subscribers will receive a notification at the start of the live stream.

► please register here (free)

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Thursday, 23 June 2022, 3-6pm

Session I – Black Mourning
Mackenzie Stephenson, Reflecting on ‘The End of White Supremacy, an American Romance’ by Saidiya Hartman
Michelle Aboagye, The Affective Pain of Black Women
Stephanie Latty, Listening to Ghosts: Grieving Dispossession Through Horror

Session II – Colonial Endings
Hazal Halavut, In Search of Grief: Afterlives in Colonial Erasure
Boron Usmon, Grieving a Future: Russian Colonialism, Kyrgyz Poetry, and the End of Times
Vasuki Shanmuganathan, Endless Mourning: Gardiner Expressway Protests and Speaking Tamil Bodies into Being

Friday, 24 June 2022, 3-6pm

Session III – Queer Grief
Ianna Hawkins Owen, Replaying the Record: Grief’s Temporalities
Sohini Chatterjee, Grief, Affective Politics, and Trans Activism as Collective Resistance in India
Christopher Smith, On Necrologies: Catalogues, Digital Archives, and the Limits of Collective Mourning

Session IV – Being Life
Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, Grief Medicines
Jade Hui, A Buddhist ‘Love’ Letter to Hong Kong

Thu, Jun 23, 2022
03:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto