Matters of Life and Death began its life as an attempt to think through two terms that loom large in our critical vocabularies of culture: life and death. How might cultural studies be a kind of life studies? Whose lives matter, and of what matter are lives made? What is a good life? And a good death? What are the lives and deaths of goods? What has become of everyday life, as philosophy and practice, in an age of environmental degradation, global flows of commodities and capital, and political insecurity? How have both culture and nature been recast as life, challenging human exceptionalism? From El Salvador to Flint, by way of San Luis Potosi, Pittsburgh and the Allagash, we look at everyday life and everyday death, at its vital infrastructures and animate representations, life and death in Pacific dioramas, Mexican songs, and British tabloids, the minimal spaces of living and the warehouses of dying, the necropolitics of biocapital. What is living and what is dead?
