Risk, mourning, politics: Toward a transnational critical conception of grief for COVID-19 deaths in Iran

Abstract

This article examines the case of COVID-19 deaths and grief in Iran in order to shed light on how the biological, social and political ‘risks of contagion’ combine to impact mourning and grief. As a contagious biological agent, the novel coronavirus causes people to suffer, die and grieve alone. But this loneliness is deepened due to social stigma and political abandonment. Conceptually guided by Mary Douglas’s work on the socio-cultural and political constructions of ‘contagion’, Judith Butler’s notion of ‘ungrievable lives’ and Kenneth Doka’s concept of ‘disenfranchised grief’, the authors of this article have undertaken a preliminary mixed-methods study that explores the possibility of a transnational, decolonial understanding of grief in a time of contagion.