Introduction

Summary

The third and final plate of mushroom risotto arrived. We were seated together at a Stockholm restaurant on the eve of a workshop on death and dying titled ‘Dying at the margins: A critical exploration of material-discursive perspectives to death and dying’, organized by Natashe Lemos Dekker and Jesse D. Peterson, with funding provided by the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory as part of the Environmental Humanities for a Concerned Europe innovative training network. The multidisciplinary workshop would bring together 16 scholars from nine different countries to connect scholars around research exploring how dying ‘bodies’ – broadly understood to include humans, animals, plants, things and places – challenge natural and normative notions of a ‘good’ death. Joining Natashe and Jesse at dinner was Phil Olson, who would give the next morning's keynote address. It seemed fitting that each of us would settle on fungus to nourish our minds and bodies during our first in-person meeting. After all, fungi are a symbol of decay, dissolution and putrefaction, fruiting harbingers that, by confronting their observers with the transformation of death back into life, challenge the definitions of the living, dying, alive, dead, not-alive, undead, and more. Reflecting on this moment, we can say that it was this very challenge that brought us together.

Though the three of us operate in different fields – Jesse in environmental humanities, Phil in science and technology studies, and Natashe in anthropology – we confirmed over the course of the next two days of workshop activities that we and the rest of the workshop participants were asking similar questions about how materialities, practices and stories challenge and complicate standard human conceptions of death and dying. Such questions are deeply important, as death's social and cultural meanings in society underscore practices ranging from efforts to defer death to preparations for funeral and burial rites; from practices of grief and mourning to forensic efforts to understand the causes of death; and from intervening in the processes of death and decomposition to interrogating the agentic dynamics of death and decomposition.