Bodies Matter: Death and Shiite Muslim Migrants

Date: July 8-13, 2019

Venue: Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, UK

Conveners:
Emel Akçalı (Swansea University, UK)
Pedram Khosronejad (Oklahoma State University, USA)

This is a call for a one-day brainstorming meeting regarding Death and Shiite Muslim Migrants which will be held in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Swansea University, in the United Kingdom from July 8-13, 2019 (the precise day will be announced later).

The aim of this international and interdisciplinary meeting is to bring together scholars of different fields in social and human sciences (anthropology, sociology, religion, politics, international law, international relations, refugee studies), NGOs and GOs, policymakers, journalists, and religious leaders to discuss how Shiite Muslim migrants (including refugees and asylum-seekers) deal with the phenomenon of death and its related matters once they are no longer in their mother country, and how the host countries, their governments and institutions, and consequently local communities respond to this.

The main aim of this gathering is to ascertain who is who in the field of research and encourage participants to collaborate in an international research project within a new research network.

In this international program, we are going to explore and discuss legal, religious, political, socio-cultural and economic aspects of the death and dying of Shiite migrants and also the institutionalization of Shiite Islam in this regard among Western societies.

Following this general framework, some of our main sub-topics of interest will be:

- Death at the borders
- Death on the high seas
- Death in refugee camps and detention facilities
- Death during deportation or forced return to the homeland
- Burial rituals and ceremonies as sign and expression of identity
- Treatment of corpses
- Legal death organizations, cemeteries and burial plots
- Tombstones and funerary epitaphs

Source: www.shii-news.imes.ed.ac.uk