An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Nechama Brodie (African Fellow, 2025-26)
Necrodata: How counting death creates meaning
Different disciplinary and socio-geographical approaches to counting, reporting and categorising death yield divergent and often contradictory values of risk, harm and mortality.
Building on the works of Foucault and Mbembe in particular, “necrodata” is a framework for inquiry into how phenomena of death are made visible (or obscured) through choices related to quantification, data, and statistics, and how these figures are explained or narrated. Necrodata asks what is counted as “death”, whose deaths are counted, and in which contexts and in which time/s. It also considers how the ways in which we count and recount death reflect specific socio-political contexts and even disciplinary approaches, and how these create specific meaning.
This work in progress will discuss necrodata as a framework for considering how different ways of counting and accounting for death produce very different problems and solutions in specific contexts, looking at both natural and non-natural deaths – during South Africa’s early HIV pandemic, and the country’s initial waves of Covid-19 decades later; and examining deaths recorded due to violent crime and conflict in present-day South Africa and Sudan.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81113670095
Passcode: 38bakW8E