III INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR
Images of Death and Grief in Popular Media
12 de Junio de 2025 a las 12H.
We are pleased to share the poster and the PDF with the full programme and abstracts.
PROGRAMME
12.00H Presentación de Panagiotis Pentaris. Thanatology Research Lab
12.15H Representaciones del Duelo y el Dolor: Visibilización, Agencia y Transformación Social a través de la Imagen. Introducción al proyecto por Montse Morcate, Investigadora Principal (IP)
12.30H Mattia Petricola. Self-mourning and Posthumous Identity in Popular Film: On The Lovely Bones (2009) and Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006)
12.50H Dr Stacey Pitsillides
13.10H Susana de Noronha
13.30H Outi Hakola. Total Pain in Audiovisual Representations of Pediatric Palliative Care
13.50H Conclusiones
ABSTRACTS
Presentation – Dr. Panagiotis Pentaris
Dr. Panagiotis Pentaris is an Associate Professor of Social Work & Thanatology, with international education and practice experience in disaster work and end of life care. Panagiotis is the Director of Research and Research Studies for the Department of Social,Therapeutic and Community Studies at Goldsmiths University of London, UK, where he is also acting as Deputy Head. His work has focused on death, dying, bereavement, religion, belief, gender and sexual diversity, and disaster social work. He is the founding leader of the Thanatology Research Lab at the University of London, and his research has explored aspects of death and dying in social science and social policy internationally.
Introduction to the project: Representations of grief and pain: visibilization, agency and social transformations through the image – Dr. Montse Morcate (PI)
The project deals with visual narratives and images related to processes of grief and pain with the aim of analyzing and detecting the processes of visibilization of certain people and groups that suffer from them and that are invisibilized or stigmatized. At the same time, the capacity for action and agency of these images is addressed, as well as their potential as mediators of the grieving process.
Dr. Montse Morcate is an artist, researcher and lecturer in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. Morcate’s research focuses on the visual representation of death, illness and grief, and she takes a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses contemporary art, visual anthropology, the medical humanities, the digital humanities, photojournalism and historical memory. Currently she is the PI of the research Project “Contemporary representations of grief and pain: visibilization, agency and social transformation through the image”. (Representaciones contemporáneas del duelo y el dolor: visibilizacion, agencia y transformación social a través de la imagen). Proyectos de Generación de Conocimiento 2022 (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades) and the artistic residency “Matrix on fire: invisible narratives of grief, pain and violence” at Roca Umbert Fabrica de les Arts.
Self-mourning and Posthumous Identity in Popular Film: On The Lovely Bones (2009) and Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006) – Dr. Mattia Petricola
This talk examines representations of self-mourning and posthumous subjectivity in The Lovely Bones (2009) and Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006). In both films, protagonists die—or enter liminal states—and migrate to alternate planes of existence, where they gain the capacity to mourn their own deaths. These narratives challenge traditional frameworks of grief by positioning the dead as both mourners and mourned. Wristcutters ultimately permits a return to the living, suggesting that self-mourning can catalyze renewal. By contrast, The Lovely Bones culminates in a bittersweet closure: the heroine both witnesses and participates in the bereavement of the living, then relinquishes her ties to the material world. The talk explores how these films reimagine mourning, self-narration, and the afterlife.
Dr. Mattia Petricola is adjunct professor of literary theory and intermedial studies at the University of L’Aquila (Italy). His research on thanatology focuses on intermedial states between life and death, the representation of death in popular culture, and queer death studies. He co-authored, with Panagiotis Pentaris, chapters for the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Death and the forthcoming Routledge Queer Death Studies reader.
Death Fictions – Dra. Stacey Pitsillides
Fictions enable us, at a safe distance, to explore our relationship with the world. Design Fictions allow us to enter these worlds: letting people experience, touch and explore them (Galloway and Caudwell, 2018). At times to provoke (Dunne and Raby, 2013), at others to reassure (Coulton et al, 2017). Drawing from speculative feminist thinking (María Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Paxling, 2018) and posthuman imaginaries (Neimanis et al, 2015) this talk will use examples from film, literature and design practice to draw people into re-imagining death – to confront, unpack, rethink, or play with how death can be brought closer and mediated through a bio-technical lens into alternative futures.
Dr Stacey Pitsilides is an Associate Professor in the School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries at Northumbria University and co-lead of the Design Feminisms Research Group. Her research into death, creativity and technology, has been explored through a series of publications, and a body of practice, including the Death Positive Library: Love After Death. Collaborating with hospices, festivals, libraries and scientists, her practice research has been commissioned and installed during NESTA’s FutureFest, London Design Week, the ESRC Festival of Social Science and DesignTO festival, Toronto, among others. She is an honorary research fellow for the Centre for Death and Society (CDAS), University of Bath, an elected member for the Council of the Association for the Study of Death and Society (ASDS) and on the board of artistic directors for D6:EU, a cultural NGO based in Cyprus. Illness, Death, and Grief Narratives in the Age of Generative AI: Towards a Theory of Human-Machine Visual Storytelling
Illness, Death, and Grief Narratives in the Age of Generative Al: Towards a Theory of Human-Machine Visual Storytelling – Dra. Susana de Noronha
An evolving technology – artificial intelligence (AI) image generators – is engendering a new variant of illness narratives that calls into question previous assumptions about their connection to traditional forms of art and image-making. These technologies are not only reshaping how we represent and make sense of illness, but also how we represent death and grief. The social sciences must interrogate and analyze these shifts, developing a comprehensive theory of the embeddedness of AI-generated images in personal and collective experiences of illness, dying, mourning and remembrance. We must ask in what ways these images matter for a renewed relationship not only with out bodies, but with loss – in how we visualize vulnerability, mortality, and resilience, and how we narrate the emotional and existential dimensions of suffering, death, and grieving through human-machine collaboration.
Susana de Noronha is a Researcher at CIES-Iscte – Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, University Institute of Lisbon (IUL), Portugal. Anthropologist and Sociologist (Ph.D.), she works at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology of Art, and Material and Visual Culture Studies.
Total Pain in Audiovisual Representations of Pediatric Palliative Care – Dra. Outi Hakola
Documentary narratives about terminally ill children in pediatric palliative care construct affective and embodied representations of death and dying. The loss of a child is a profoundly tragic event, inflicting pain not only on the child but also on their family and medical caregivers. Adopting a phenomenological approach to pain, I apply Cicely Saunders’ concept of total pain to interpret audiovisual narratives such as the documentary television series The Hospice (2008) and Beautiful Lives (2011), as well as the documentary films Some Good Days (Davies, 1996), Griefwalker (Wilson, 2008), and Dying in Your Mother’s Arms (Beder, 2020). I argue that the subtle yet emotionally overwhelming portrayal of dying children extends the experience of grief and suffering to the viewer, rendering total pain a shared, affective experience. Instead of presenting fixed moral judgments, these narratives invite viewers to feel, reflect, and create an emotional connection to suffering in a way that makes these deaths visible and meaningful in contemporary society.
Dr. Outi Hakola is a lecturer in the Department of Health and Social Management at the University of Eastern Finland. Her background is in film studies, and her research concentrates on questions of death, dying, and health in audiovisual culture. Her most recent book Filming Death: End-of-Life Documentary Cinema was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024.
This seminar forms part of the R&D&I project Contemporary Representations of Grief and Pain: Visibility, Agency and Social Transformation through the Image (PID2022-137176OA-I00), funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER.
