We wholeheartedly invite you to join us on the evening of 23^rd October for a conversation around and Helsinki book launch of Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies (2025, eds. Nina Lykke, Tara Mehrabi, and Marietta Radomska).

We will be joined by two members of the editorial team, Marietta Radomska and Nina Lykke, who will present the book alongside three of the books contributors, Björn Kröger, Patricia MacCormack and Margrit Shildrick.

Taking research and art-making on death, dying, mourning, and afterlife into new directions, the book explores the multiple effects of contemporary necropolitics and the proliferation of death-worlds during the current period of Earth’s history, ‘The Anthropocene’.

Informed by queer, critical posthumanist, decolonial, and feminist approaches, the Handbook presents a unique variety of both critical and affirmative reflections upon the world’s intersecting necropowers, and ethico-political potentials for social and environmental change. Contributors speculate on ways to reimagine life/ death-relations as vibrant entanglements. They also investigate modes of mourning differently, resisting necropolitical regimes that deem human and non-human individuals and populations to be disposable and non-grievable when they differ too much from the normative modern subject, Universal Man, in terms of intersections of gender, racialisation, class, sexuality, embodiment, embrainment, geopolitical positioning, or species.

Read more about the book here

Speaker Bios

Björn Kröger is a paleontology curator at the Finnish Museum of Natural History and an associate professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research examines eco-evolutionary dynamics across temporal and spatial scales, alongside an interdisciplinary interest in how knowledge of ecological change is acquired, communicated, and applied. He co-authored the chapter "The Deep Time of Death" in the Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies.

Nina Lykke is a queerfemme-inist philosopher-poet and writer, Emerita-Professor, Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and member of CUHRE (Elite Center for Understanding Human Relationships with the Environment), University of Southern Denmark. She* co-founded the international Network for Queer Death Studies, and is author of numerous books, including Vibrant Death (2022), Feminist Reconfigurations of Alien Encounters (2024), and Cancer Ecologies (2026). She* co-edited Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies (2025).

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy in Humanities at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008), Posthuman Ethics (2012) and The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene (2020) and the editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008), The Animal Catalyst (2014), Deleuze and the Animal (2017), and Ecosophical Aesthetics (2018). Her newest book is Death Activism: Queer Death Studies and the Posthuman. She is also the author of numerous journal articles and anthology chapters. She writes on french philosophy, queer theory, radical ecology, animal rights, death studies, horror film and occulture, amongst other esoterica.

Marietta Radomska, PhD, Docent, is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Linköping University; director of The Eco- and Bioart Lab; co-founder of Queer Death Studies Network; member of Bioart Society; and co-editor of State of the Art – Elements for Critical Thinking and Doing (2023) and Routledge Handbook of Queer Death Studies (2025). She works at the intersection of environmental humanities, continental philosophy, queer death studies, visual culture, contemporary art, and artistic research

Margrit Shildrick. Guest Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Stockholm University, works mainly in the field of biophilosophy.  Current projects include an ongoing collaboration with Queer Death Studies; excursions into bioart and its posthumanist implications; and rethinking the concept of the gift as central to posthumanist ethics. Her many books include Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (2002), and Visceral Prostheses: Somatechnics and Posthuman Embodiment