About me Archives - Hajar Ghorbani

Calls For Book Chapters

Title: Decolonising Death Studies

Co-Editors: Dr Panagiotis Pentaris, Dr Stacey Pitsillides & Hajar Ghorbani

Overview

Social and cultural factors can strongly influence how we approach death and dying, including attitudes towards death, rituals and practices surrounding death, and end-of-life care. The World Health Organization notes that understanding these factors is important for improving the quality of life and care for individuals facing life-limiting illnesses (WHO, 2021).

Hamilton et al. (2022) note that current knowledge in death studies tends to be influenced by Western views, conforming identities, specific disciplines, the English language, and a certain generation, which can limit its application to policy and practice. The authors argue that decolonising death studies requires exploring the nature of knowledge that underpins claimed expertise in this area, which has universal implications for policies, practices, theory, and research. This is not a new argument, but one which was noted in 1978 by Lofland, critiquing the happy death movement’s lack of diversity, claiming that its proponents were predominantly heteronormative, white and affluent. More contemporary research groups in death studies, like the Queer Death Studies Network (2016) and the Collective for Radical Death Studies, address this by collecting a wider body of literature in the field of death studies.

The increasing diversity and plurality of populations around the world necessitates further attention to diversifying evidence and knowledge to ensure that it effectively serves its beneficiaries (Mokhov and Pentaris, 2022). However, there is potential risk for re-colonising knowledge in this area due to the persistence of English-speaking, Western, and conforming expertise in the field that may or may not understand the connected histories of colonialism. To address this, networks of knowledge and expertise that challenge these limitations and seek to avoid the risk of re-colonisation to broaden the case of knowledge and key texts used by death studies researchers are needed. Such networks may be physical, contextual or digital, but they always lead to collective discourses that break free from the colonisation of death studies.

With that in mind, this book is looking to host the space for an interdisciplinary, international, especially from under-represented groups, dialogue which seeks to advance our exploration of both knowledge outside of the colonised and the degree of the current knowledge’s applicability in the field. Additionally, and drawing from Jansen’s (2019) thesis on the politics of knowledge focusing on the lack of postcolonial, indigenous and critical knowledge, the proposed book will become a beneficial tool for its ability to pool resources and expertise. This can help reduce gaps in the current knowledge base.

focusing on the exploration of the colonisation, re-colonisation and decolonisation of death studies – no matter the expertise of the contributors (e.g., assisted dying, AI and grief, art-based practices with dying individuals, etc.) – are welcome. The volume is particularly interested in the inclusion of minoritised voices and perspectives, in the collaboration of authors with people with lived experience, as well as the learning from different geographies and disciplines. Further, proposals linked with any of the many global issues and phenomena and how those manifest on the experiences of death, dying and bereavement are welcome. This volume will also welcome shorter forms of writing, for example: experiential essays, reflections on practice wisdom or autobiographic accounts.

The proposed book will be submitted to Routledge for consideration.

If you wish to discuss your idea about a contribution before submitting an abstract, please contact the coeditors directly.

How to submit your abstract

Please submit your abstract (approximately 350-500 words) to the co-editors at Panagiotis.Pentaris@gold.ac.uk, Stacey.Pitsillides@northumbria.ac.uk and hghorba1@ualberta.ca including a short biographical note of the proposed authors (approximately 50-100 words per author) by the 8th of December 2023. Please include all information in a single Word file which you can submit as an attachment via email.

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Artistic Background and Visual-Material Practice

My path into anthropology began through art. Before I entered the social sciences, I was trained as an artist, with an early focus on design and visual-material practice. My undergraduate education gave me a broad and technically grounded formation in making, drawing, painting, woodworking, sculpture, installation, and object design. This training was not limited to the production of images. It was also an education in material, surface, form, weight, texture, proportion, and the relation between objects and space.

During my undergraduate studies, I worked extensively with wood and learned several traditional and technical methods, including marquetry, khatam, woodcarving, sculpture, box-making, frame-making, and object construction. I was also trained in aspects of industrial design, including the design and fabrication of tools, frames, boxes, and display structures. I became interested in geometric forms associated with Islamic architecture, especially girih and lattice-based compositions, where repetition, precision, structure, and ornament produce both visual and spatial effects. Alongside these practices, I also worked with resin and other material techniques that allowed me to think more experimentally about surface, transparency, layering, and preservation.

My painting and drawing practice developed in parallel with this material training. I worked with colored pencil, chalk pastel, graphite, different pencil-based techniques, and ink. Chalk pastel became especially important in my early practice because of its softness, density, and capacity to hold both fragility and intensity on the surface. I was particularly interested in portraiture, the human face, texture, and the expressive force of line and color. This interest led to my solo painting exhibition in Kerman, titled Portraits, in which I primarily used chalk pastel.

Installation art was another important part of my artistic formation. During my undergraduate studies, I created two installation-based projects that combined sculpture, music, spatial arrangement, and conceptual research. One installation engaged Mesopotamian mythologies and the agency of great goddesses. Through sculpture and spatial composition, I explored how female divine figures could be imagined not simply as mythological subjects, but as agents whose presence, form, and material arrangement shaped the viewer’s encounter with the work.

The second installation was more directly connected to death, memory, gender, and Iranian culture. I constructed six wooden tombstones dedicated to six influential women in Iranian cultural history. The work combined carved or constructed wooden forms with music and installation-based presentation. Looking back, this project was one of my earliest attempts to think about the relationship between the dead, material objects, commemoration, gendered memory, and public recognition. Even before I had the full anthropological language for these questions, I was already working with themes that later became central to my academic research: tombstones, memory, gender, material presence, and the agency of commemorative forms.

This artistic background profoundly shaped the way I later approached anthropology. Art trained me to look slowly and materially. It taught me to notice how objects are made, how surfaces carry traces, how forms organize attention, and how images and materials produce encounters. When I later began studying cemeteries, tombstones, martyr graves, photographs, coffins, portraits, ritual objects, and memorial spaces, I did not approach them only as symbolic materials or cultural data. I approached them as visual and material forms that act within social life. My artistic training allowed me to see how material cultures can shape memory, produce obligation, organize mourning, and mediate relations between the living and the dead.

In my undergraduate and master’s research, this connection between art and anthropology became more explicit. I became increasingly interested in the visual elements of cemeteries, especially martyr cemeteries, and in the material culture that surrounds death and commemoration. I studied tombstones, inscriptions, portraits, symbols, colors, spatial arrangements, objects placed on graves, and the aesthetic organization of funerary spaces. These materials allowed me to bring together visual analysis, semiotics, material culture, and anthropological questions about death, memory, religion, gender, and political meaning.

Today, this visual-material orientation continues to shape both my scholarship and my creative practice. My doctoral research on the agency of dead bodies in contemporary Iran is grounded not only in ethnographic fieldwork, but also in close attention to bodies, images, textures, graves, objects, spatial arrangements, and ritual forms. Alongside academic writing, I continue to develop mixed-media work that brings together photography, painting, texture, collage, and material experimentation. I am also interested in filmmaking and documentary practice as ways of extending anthropological thinking beyond written scholarship.

Encountering Anthropology

I was born in Shiraz, Iran, in a large family. My early path into art was shaped by both desire and resistance. Although I was deeply drawn to art, my father initially opposed my decision to attend an art school. As a result, my education took an unconventional form. For several years, I stepped outside the formal school system and used that period to explore different practices, especially drawing, painting, and martial arts. I trained in Kung Fu, participated in competitions, and continued to develop my skills in painting, particularly with chalk pastel. This period was difficult, but it also shaped my independence, discipline, and capacity for self-directed learning.

After several years, I persuaded my father to allow me to take the entrance exam for an art program. I was eventually admitted to the Islamic Art program at Isfahan University of Art. Moving from Shiraz to Isfahan was a major turning point in my life. It was not only a move from one city to another; it was my first serious encounter with a new intellectual, artistic, and urban environment. Isfahan itself became part of my education. I began to walk through the city, observe its architecture, photograph its streets and objects, and experience urban space as something that could be read, interpreted, and analyzed.

At Isfahan University of Art, I studied in the Department of Religious and Civilization Arts. The department created an unusual intellectual environment where art was not approached only as technique, beauty, or form, but also as a way of thinking about culture, history, religion, society, and meaning. Between 2009 and 2013, I encountered scholars from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, semiotics, mythology, and art history. Their courses and conversations introduced me to new ways of understanding visual and material culture.

A decisive moment came when I took a course in the anthropology of art. This course changed the way I looked at the world around me. The concept of culture became central to my thinking. I began to understand that objects, images, rituals, spaces, and everyday practices could be studied as part of wider social worlds. My artistic practice of looking, drawing, and photographing gradually became connected to anthropological observation. I was no longer only interested in how things looked, but also in what they did, what they meant, and how they organized relations between people, places, memories, and histories.

During this period, I often walked through Isfahan with my camera. One day, by chance, I came across Takht-e-Fulad, a historic cemetery in the city. The tombstones immediately caught my attention. Their forms, inscriptions, symbols, materials, and visual arrangements seemed to hold complex cultural meanings. I photographed them and later discussed the images with Jabbar Rahmani, an anthropologist in our department. He encouraged me to think of tombstones as cultural texts and suggested that I explore the anthropology of death, a field that was still relatively underdeveloped in Iran at the time.

This encounter became the foundation of my undergraduate thesis, “Cultural Semiotics of Tombstone Signs in the Takht-e-Fulad Cemetery.” The project allowed me to bring together my artistic training and my emerging anthropological interests. Tombstones were no longer simply visual or decorative objects. They became material forms through which death, memory, religion, gender, class, and cultural identity could be read and interpreted. Based on this work, I later published an article and presented my research at an international conference in Turkey in 2013.

This movement from Shiraz to Isfahan, and from art to anthropology, continues to shape my work today. My research on death, cemeteries, martyrdom, mourning, and the agency of dead bodies grew out of this early encounter between visual practice and anthropological thinking. Art trained me to attend to form, texture, composition, and material presence. Anthropology gave me the conceptual tools to connect those forms to social life, ritual, memory, power, and political meaning.