Mobilities in Life and Death

Avril Maddrell is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Reading, UK. She is a feminist geographer, with research interests in spaces, landscapes and practices of death, mourning and remembrance; diversity issues; sacred mobilities; and historiography.  She is author/co-author/editor of numerous books, including, Deathscapes. Spaces for death, dying, mourning and remembrance (Ashgate, 2010), Consolationscapes ... (Routledge 2019); Memory, Mourning, Landscape (Rodopi, 2010); Sacred Mobilities (Ashgate 2015) and Contemporary Encounters in Gender and Religion (Palgrave 2017). 

Sonja Kmec is Associate Professor in Luxembourgish Cultural Studies and History at the University of Luxembourg. She obtained her DPhil in modern history at the University of Oxford, UK in 2004 and undertook postdoctoral research on memory politics and nation-building processes using Luxembourg as case-study in a transnational perspective. In 2014 she was Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley (Fulbright award). Her areas of expertise include gender and religious history as well as popular culture and material culture.

Tanu Priya Uteng is a Chief Research Officer at the Institute of Transport Economics in Oslo, Norway.  She has worked extensively across a host of cross-cutting issues in the field of urban and transport planning in the past 18 years. A few of her areas of expertise include: inclusive cities, mobilities, social exclusion, evaluation and gender studies. In her various research undertakings, she attempts to build a nuanced and structured understanding of designing and creating inclusive cities. Her edited books include Gendered Mobilities (2008), Urban Mobilities in the Global South (2017) and Gendering Smart Mobilities (2020).

Mariske Westendorp is a cultural anthropologist and religious studies scholar. She was awarded her PhD at Macquarie University, Sydney, in 2016 and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. She is co-editor of New Perspectives on Urban Deathscapes (Edward Elgar 2023) and her interests include the study of urban religion, lived religion/spirituality, and death studies.

This open access book focuses on migrant and minority cemetery needs through the conceptual lens of the mobilities of the living and the dead. In doing so, the book brings migration and mobility studies into much-needed dialogue with death studies to explore the symbolically and politically important issue of culturally inclusive spaces of cemeteries and crematoria for migrants and established minorities. The book addresses majority and minority cemetery and crematoria provisions and practices in a range of North West European contexts. It describes how the planning, management and use of cemeteries and crematoria in multicultural societies can tell us about the everyday lived experiences of migration and migrant heritage, urban diversity, social inclusion and exclusion in Europe, and how these relate to migrant and minority experience of lived citizenship, practices of territoriality and bordering, colonial/postcolonial narratives.

The book will be of interest to readers inthe fields of migration/mobilities studies and death studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners, such as local government officers, cemetery managers and city planners.