02/07/2026 09:00 - 17:10

HALL: Parenzo - A19

Contact: Scianguetta R.

Chair: Scianguetta R., Winterberg A.A.

Death is a universal event, yet the ways in which it is imagined, interpreted, and governed are profoundly shaped by religious worldviews that define its meaning, its normative force, and its social visibility. Far from being a purely biological threshold, mortality becomes a conceptual and ritual field in which distinctions of status, gender, economic condition, and cultural belonging are negotiated, reinforced, or contested.


This panel invites contributions examining how religious traditions construct the phenomenology, ethics, and management of death—from philosophical and theological conceptions of mortality and human dignity, to ritual economies of commemoration, to normative frameworks regulating access to care, mourning, or recognition. Particular attention is given to the ways in which these constructions participate in the production, legitimation, or mitigation of social and legal inequalities.


Possible directions include: religious models of dignified dying and the moral value of the deceased; symbolic systems that encode or challenge hierarchical distinctions; ritual, ethical, or legal regimes that differentially allocate care, memory, or ritual privilege; and the interplay between religious conceptions of death and public policies concerning end-of-life issues or the management of the dead.


Bringing together perspectives from the history of religions, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and related fields, the panel aims to critically interrogate the complex nexus between mortality, religious normativity, and the dynamics of (in)equality.