This symposium is based on an online international and interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, on June 23 and 24, 2022.
While there has been sustained discussion on grief in relation to illness, war, and death, what is at stake when we explore this affective landscape in relation to loss and sadness, which illuminate grief in the realm of the living?
Without abandoning the phenomena of individual and collective mourning in relation to ongoing historical events and atrocities, how might we tend to the deeper revelations that “grief” offers us? What are these revelations that reside beneath “grief” and what do they offer? What ethical engagements with “grief” enable a critique of modern conceptions of temporality, spatiality, and corporeality that often compel, if not demand, a linear engagement with loss, which assumes an expiration of this affective relation? What livable futures might we imagine if we embraced grief as a radical affective resource for change?
This online gathering hosted by Race, Ethics, and Power (REP) Project considers multiple interpretations of grief, while accounting for the situational, local, and transcultural contexts of its emergence.
Session I – Black Mourning
- Mackenzie Stephenson, Reflecting on ‘The End of White Supremacy, an American Romance’ by Saidiya Hartman
- video ➡︎ 0:00:00
- Michelle Aboagye, The Affective Pain of Black Women
- video ➡︎ 0:12:55
- Stephanie Latty, Listening to Ghosts: Grieving Dispossession Through Horror
- video ➡︎ 0:32:20
Session II – Colonial Endings
- Hazal Halavut, In Search of Grief: Afterlives in Colonial Erasure
- video ➡︎ 0:53:01
- Boron Usmon, Grieving a Future: Russian Colonialism, Kyrgyz Poetry, and the End of Times
- video ➡︎ 1:13:40
- Vasuki Shanmuganathan, Endless Mourning: Gardiner Expressway Protests and Speaking Tamil Bodies into Being
- video ➡︎ 1:30:11
Session III – Queer Grief
- Ianna Hawkins Owen, Replaying the Record: Grief’s Temporalities
- video ➡︎ 0:00:00
- Sohini Chatterjee, Grief, Affective Politics, and Trans Activism as Collective Resistance in India
- Christopher Smith, On Necrologies: Catalogues, Digital Archives, and the Limits of Collective Mourning
- video ➡︎ 0:11:26
Session IV – Being Life
- Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing, Grief Medicines
- Jade Hui, A Buddhist ‘Love’ Letter to Hong Kong
- video ➡︎ 0:34:25

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