The Afterlife of Materiality: Presence and Distance in the Academy

This paper examines the tensions of writing about personal experiences of death and grief within academic disciplines that privilege emotional distance over intimacy. Focusing on material artifacts belonging to my deceased loved ones—particularly my mother—I interrogate how scholarly conventions render such objects as lifeless rather than relational. Writing from intimate proximity becomes a methodological challenge to dominant modes of scholarly analysis that require emotional detachment. In do so, this paper explores what it means to take seriously the afterlives of material objects as sites of memory, presence, ongoing personal relational formation, and as counters to biological and academic disappearance.