Moving on in Merseyside and Cheshire: Mobilising geographies of deathscapes

In recent years geographers have explored 'deathscapes' in a myriad of ways: examining how space and society intersect through processes and practices of collective and individual memorialisation (Drozdzewski et al. 2016; Gibson 2011; Ginn 2014, Maddrell 2013), and more recently burial and cremation (Jassal 2015; Romanillos 2015; Stevenson et al. 2016; Yarwood et al. 2015). In particular, research has sought to make sense of cemeteries as spaces that articulate socio-cultural and economic relations (Herman 2010); and as spaces of recreation and remembrance in the present (Winter 2011). However, although death involves a transition or movement, from the living to nonliving world, geographies of death are largely static (Jassel 2015). This project aims therefore, by following the closure, repurposing, and movement of municipal cemeteries on the Wirral, Merseyside, to trace and explore the mobile geographies of death, burial and cremation. In doing so this project will consider how tensions regarding the consecration, demarcation and volume of space work to mobilise geographies of death, and how these tensions bring new knowledge to the socio-spatial organisation of death through the interconnected (im)mobilities of bodies, materials and matter. This project seeks to consider how such mobilities have shaped discourses and knowledge of public health surrounding cemeteries and the deceased, informing how death is negotiated and entangled within everyday social encounters. Secondly, by drawing on historical demography, this project will produce mapped visualisations of the movements related to burials in the region, to investigate the spatial movements of death in relation to socio-demographic factors, that will allow this project to think about the spatial politics and territorialisation of death and the cemetery, through how bodies and identities are spatially organised and discursively constructed both outside and inside the cemetery.