This year’s theme is Social death, which can refer to the extinction of an individual’s social or legal identity/agency, either before or sometime after physical death, and may be self or other inflicted; it can also refer to the death of a social group or culture. Before physical death, it can mean being treated as a thing or commodity, disintegration of social networks, extreme isolation, or forced removal of individuals/groups from their group/land of origin/belonging. After physical death, the deceased’s social identity and even possibly agency can be kept alive in a number of ways. The term ‘social death’, often meaning rather different things, has been developed independently by researchers in a range of fields, including gerontology, dementia, psychology and death studies, but also mental health, the history of slavery, and genocide studies.

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