This book provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond traditional perspectives of a nature/culture binary. Bringing together a range of international scholars, it sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures.

Introduction - Jesse D. Peterson, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Philip R. Olson Part I: Ontologies & Epistemologies 1. ‘Seeing for real’: Forensic Pathologists Testing the Demonstrative Power of Postmortem Imaging - Céline Schnegg, Séverine Rey, Alejandro Dominguez 2. Death at a Planetary Scale: Mortality’s Materiality in the Context of the Anthropocene - Philip R. Olson 3. Death in the Fields: Microbial ‘Destruction’ in Polluted Soils - Serena Zanzu 4. Can the Baltic Sea Die? An Environmental Imaginary of a Dying Sea - Jesse D. Peterson Part II: Care & Remembrance 5. Viral Flows and Immunological Gestures: Contagious and Dead Bodies in México and Ecuador during COVID-19 - Rosa Inés Padilla Yépez, Anne W. Johnson 6. Advertising the Ancestors: Ghanaian Funeral Banners as Image Objects - Isabel Bredenbroker 7. Dying Apart and Buried Together: COVID-19, Cemeteries, and Fears of Collective Burial - Samuel Holleran 8. Spirit Mediums at the Margins: Materiality, Death, and Dying in Northern Zimbaabwee - Olga Sicilia Part III: Troubling Agencies 9. Rehabilitate or Euthanize?: Biopolitics and Care in Seal Conservation - Doortje Hoerst 10. Troubling Entanglements: Death, Loss and the Dead in and on Television - Bethan Michael-Fox 11. Material Entanglements of the Corpse - Marc Trabsky and Jacinthe Flore 12. The Dead Who Would be Trees and Mushrooms - Hannah Gould, Tamara Kohn, Michael Arnold, Allison Fraser Concluding Discussion 13. Beyond the Norms - Jesse D. Peterson, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Philip R. Olson

• Decentres the death of the human subject as the central topic in death studies • Provides research of the death and dying of non-human beings, such as animals, microbes and environments • Features a diverse range of international scholars using innovative theoretical and methodological scholarship.