Death, Memory and Extinction

About the workshop

Sign up for the event.

Invited scholars and artists grapple with these technologies of life and death, here explored primarily as systems of power that monitor and optimise health, productivity and reproductivity, as well as so-called biotechnological innovations. The aim of the workshop is to examine how landscapes, geographies and environments, particularly the ocean, are forms of vitality, aliveness, such that they memorialise those who died and were killed – and continue to die and be killed – on lands and in multifarious water crossings. The workshop grapples with how chosen and forced displacements are made both possible and impossible through technologies of life and death.

Programme

13.15 UK time/14.15 Scandi time: Welcome to the workshop by the organisers Donna McCormack & Ingvil Hellstrand

13.30–15.00 UK time/14.30–16.00 Scandi time: Oceans, Migrations & Transformation

• Professor Lene Myong, University of Stavanger (UiS): “You came to us on an airplane”: Transnational adoption as forced displacement
  BIO: Lene Myong is a professor at the Centre for Gender Studies (University of Stavanger). Her research explores transnational adoption and the biopolitical governance of reproduction, kinship, and race in the Nordic context.

• Dr. Celina Stifjell (NTNU): Imagining Submersion: Beginnings and Futures Beyond the Human
  BIO: Celina Stifjell recently completed a PhD at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology focusing on feminist monstrosity in speculative fiction. Her dissertation, She-Monsters and Sea Changes: Imagining Submersion in Speculative Feminist Fiction, thinks through ecofeminist and new materialist theory to examine the role of “she-monsters” as figurations that keep alive a utopian impulse of transformation in literature, film, and more.

• Associate professor Gitte Westergaard (UiS): Curating Traces of Animal Displacement
  BIO: Gitte Westergaard is an associate professor of history at the University of Stavanger. Her research interests include cultural history, environmental humanities, and museum studies. She recently defended her PhD dissertation, Island Extinction and Animal Remains in Museums, highlighting a web of connections between island ecologies, colonial expansion, and museum practices.

BREAK: 30 mins

15:30-17.00UK time/16:30-18.00 Scandi time:

Keynote Hiromi Goto

Hiromi Goto’s talk will focus on the following: “I will be presenting a short reading from my graphic novel, Shadow Life-- a tale of an elderly Japanese Canadian bisexual woman who is being chased by Death's Shadow. The reading will be followed by my thoughts on the presentation of death/dying in the narrative, as well as how death is more broadly imagined in North American popular culture particularly in relation to aging/ageism. I'll also delve into broader representations of dying in myth and traditional stories, as well as death's connection to water. I hope that we can share a conversation together-- the best kind of thinking happens when ideas are be shared, and I want to hear what people are thinking and imagining, from their cultural standpoints. Let's talk!”

BIO: Hiromi Goto is an emigrant from Japan who gratefully resides in W̱SÁNEĆ Territory. She has won numerous awards for her novels and poetry, writing for adults as well as for children. Hiromi Goto's most recent book, Shadow Life(2021), with artist Ann Xu and published by First Second Books, is her first graphic novel. She is currently at work trying to decolonize her relationship to writing and the land.