Afterlives
Questions about the endings of life, the power of death, and the making of immortality stand at the heart of my second research project. I ask how people care for, remember, and honour their dead during periods of political crisis and transnational mobility. Rather than seeing death as a point of standstill, I investigate it as a moment of transformation with powerful political, social, and cultural potential.
I am particularly interested in how practices of care and mourning for the deceased both reproduce and remake social communities, and how the dead themselves become an active presence in the lives of the living.
Most recently, I have been conducting research (funded by the Dutch Research Council) on how people on the move—migrants, refugees, and other mobile folks—care for their dead under challenging circumstances in eastern Turkey. The images displayed here are part of this ongoing research project.
