CfP: Beyond the Cemetery: Vernacular & Ephemeral Death Memorials in Contemporary Latin American Public Spaces

Deadline:  Wednesday 22 October 2025, 23:59 (Mexico City)

This is an open call for abstracts for inclusion in a Special Issue proposal for the journal Mortality:

Current status. The Mortality Editorial Board plans to review Special Issue proposals in November 2025. If our proposal is invited, we will request full papers. Any invited manuscripts will undergo double-anonymous peer review and be considered for publication according to the journal’s schedule.

Scope

This proposed Special Issue examines vernacular and ephemeral death memorials in contemporary Latin American public spaces, focusing on their unsanctioned, impermanent materiality and their roles as interventions in contested urban space. We especially welcome grounded analyses of public mourning that attend to fragility, mobility, and the often unequal distribution of the right to mourn in public. 

Topics may include:
  • Object-based tributes: roadside altars, animitas, crosses at construction sites
  • Collective acts: vigils, protest gatherings
  • Mobile homages: tribute rides
  • Site-specific interventions: ghost bikes, graffiti
  • Minimal gestures: handwritten notes at the site of death; chalk silhouettes marking a violent passing
Thematic axes:
  • Forms of vernacular memorialization. What constitutes a death memorial when it is unsanctioned, impermanent, and vulnerable to disruption or removal?
  • Embodied/affective practices & mobility of mourning. Bodies, sensory elements, gatherings, and performances that activate grief in place.
  • Grievability and the right to mourn in public across identity and migration status: legitimacy vs. erasure; sanitation/cleaning regimes, policing, surveillance, and privatization.
Article type:
  • Full-length original research articles (approx. 6,000 words). Interdisciplinary work on death and memorialization is welcome (e.g., ethnography, visual culture, urban studies) with contemporary Latin American perspectives.
Comparative references to other forms of death memorialization (e.g., cemeteries, official monuments and memorials, anti-monuments, museums/memorial parks) may be used for framing, but the primary empirical focus must be vernacular, perishable expressions in everyday public space.
 
Guest Editors “Beyond the Cemetery”:
  • Dr. Velebita Koričančić (Anáhuac México University, School of Communications; UNAM, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Department of Latin American Studies; Mexico City). Member of UNAM’s research project Social Approximations to Death (2025–2027).
  • Dr. Roberto Martínez González (UNAM, Institute of Historical Research; Mexico City). Senior anthropologist-historian and specialist in death studies; lead researcher of Social Approximations to Death (2025–2027); author of Dialogues with Death (UNAM, 2022) and The Invention of Death (UNAM, 2021).
Please submit via Google Form: https://forms.gle/QFCoSsRuubVca76w6

Contact Information: Dr. Velebita Koričančić.