Date posted: September 19, 2025
On August 27 – 30, 2025, members of the Rituals in the Marking team traveled to Utrecht, Netherlands, to participate in the 17th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal, hosted by the Association for the Study of Death & Society and Utrecht University. We presented our research as part of a double panel, “Ordinary necropolitics: Interrogating the state and its absence in everyday death,” organized by RIM research consultant Ruth Toulson, anthropology professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and PI Sarah Wagner.
The two back-to-back panels were also in celebration of Ruth’s book, published in December 2024, Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore, which won Honorable Mention for the 2025 Association for Death and Society Book Prize (announced at the conference). Congratulations, Ruth!
Paige Gavin, María José Pelaez, and Avery Nennmann presenting.
During the first panel, four scholars from RIM presented:
Maria Jose Pelaez: “‘Because you have already buried your dead’: Elsa’s dual loss and the politics of waiting in Ecuador’s COVID-19 pandemic.”
Expanding on a previous dispatch, Maria Jose’s paper examined how bureaucracy during Ecuador’s COVID peak transformed routine administration into suffering. Elsa Maldonado’s experience with contradictory claims about her mother’s remains shows how “the politics of waiting” entangle families and bureaucrats in death verification.
Paige Gavin: “Revisionism and social forgetting: Mass death from the 1918 influenza to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Paige’s talk looked at how the United States memorializes mass death due to disease, examining the historical, political, and social patterns of past disease events in parallel with the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of revisionism and social forgetting. Among other sources, she drew on ideas that arose in the virtual seminar she hosted in January 2024 with historian Nancy Bristow and epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina.
Avery Nennmann: “The necropolitical landscape of COVID misinformation in public health”
Avery addressed how misinformation and mistrust in medical authority during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted significant changes to public health in the United States and the ways in which denial undermines and harms healthcare systems and those who work within them. Many of the themes she explored came up in interviews she conducted as part of RIM’s “More Than a Healthcare Hero” project.
Sarah Wagner: “An American state of denial: The unreckoning of pandemic death, five years on.”
Sarah’s paper considered how pandemic denialism has taken new shape in the wake of President Trump’s re-election, forcing COVID bereaved to grapple with the absence of state recognition of mass death and its long-term effects.
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The second panel on “necropolitics of the ordinary” included Ruth Toulson and our very own GW anthropology PhD graduate and professor of anthropology at Washington State University, Sarah Richardson, as well as Sally Raudon (University of Cambridge) and Sasha Kramer (Johns Hopkins University).
The two panels were a great success, with questions posed to each presenter and a robust discussion of not only COVID-19 but also the larger topic of state governance of the dead.
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Next up: Team RIM will be attending and participating in the American Anthropological Association’s annual conference, November 19-23, 2025, in New Orleans. Fittingly, the conference theme this year is “Ghosts.” Paige Gavin and Avery Nennmann will host a roundtable, “Narratives of Care: Medical Professionals and Their Lived Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” and Joel Kuipers and Richard Grinker have organized a panel, “Scale and Loss: frontiers of care and the ghosts of mediation.” Stay tuned for dispatches on both.