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Introducing Blue Death Studies - An academic and artistic workshop
On May 29th 2025, a symposium was held at UCC to introduce and workshop a new theoretical intervention: Blue Death Studies.
Organised by Sarah Bezan, Kate Falconer, and Jesse Peterson of the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork, this event introduced Blue Death Studies in an academic and artistic context.
Blue Death Studies intervenes at the intersection of queer death studies and the blue humanities to challenge the terrestrial bias in academic understandings of death, and to trouble the water/corpse interface. The event featured a roundtable discussion of the themes underlying Blue Death Studies, and an exceptional keynote from Emeritus Professor of Gender Studies Nina Lykke from Linköping University, Sweden. In the afternoon, particpants were invited to engage with an artistic workshop led by local Cork artist Aoife Desmond, whose work encompasses a continual re-asking of the question, What is the human relationship to nature? The event organisers are particularly thankful to Nina and Aoife, as well as to all those who attended the day-long workshop, for their insightful contributions as we continue to develop Blue Death Studies as a theoretical grounding.
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For further information please contact kfalconer@ucc.ie thank you