Organisation and participation in workshop, seminar, course: New Immortalities (Event)

What are the values and sentiments that attach to the body at death? How do these vary across different professional and cultural communities, and where are they transformed into generalised notions with wider currency in society? In this workshop, we track the paths of a widening repertoire of cadaveric materials now being put into therapeutic and economic circulation and consider the social, cultural and ethical consequences of these acts in practice. We seek to explore national and international discourses of value centered on the uses of cadaveric tissue. Papers were solicited within three broad themes: the therapeutic uses of these materials, the education and research uses, and the new kinds of value assigned to artificial bodily materials after death. The resulting panels deal with regimes and rationales of donation, allocation and classification; the sociality of the body at death; education, spectacle and bodies as sites of learning; and relationship between ideas of time and the artificial.