During the autumn of 2025, the participants in the collaborative initiative will gather for a number of workshops and seminars. For those who are writing a thesis at Lund University during the autumn semester of 2025 (primarily at master’s level) in a related subject, there is an opportunity to join some of these activities. If so, please contact the project leader. 

On 11-13 February 2026, an international conference will be organised in the framework of the collaborative initiative. The conference is entitled ‘Place and Placelessness: Changing Roles of the Cemetery in the Contemporary World’. More information, including a CFP, will be made available here.
 

Place and Placelessness: Changing Roles of the Cemetery in the Contemporary World

Lund University, Sweden, 11-13 February 2026
 

What becomes of place in a time of placelessness? In an age shaped by global migration, digital afterlives, ecological urgency, heritage politics, and changing cultural rituals, the cemetery, once a fixed point of memory and mourning, may face radical transformation. This conference invites interdisciplinary perspectives on the evolving roles, meanings, and forms of the cemetery in contemporary and future societies.

This conference seeks to explore the cemetery not only as a site of death, but as a complex cultural, spiritual, environmental, and technological landscape. The contemporary cemetery is anchored in place yet increasingly decoupled from it. How do cemeteries reflect the social, cultural, spiritual, and environmental concerns of our time? Can cemeteries remain vital spaces of community, subjectivity, and continuity – or must they be reimagined altogether? What is preserved, commemorated, or erased in the management of cemeteries as historical landscapes? How are narratives of identity, belonging, and collective memory inscribed in, or excluded from, these spaces?

We welcome researchers in all disciplines, as well as practitioners, to contribute to a dialogue on the shifting geographies of death, remembrance, and legacy.
Proposals might engage with, but are not limited to, themes such as:

• Transnational death, diasporic cemeteries, and post-mortem disconnection from place

• Virtual cemeteries, data memorials, and online rituals of grief

• Green burials, natural cemeteries, and sustainable funerary practices

• Changing shapes of the cemetery in modern cities

• The negotiation of spiritual, religious, and secular spaces of remembrance

• The resonance of contemporary deathscapes in architecture, landscape design, and art

• Heritage as a contested ‘value’ in past and contemporary cemeteries

• Evolution and reform of historical cemeteries, archaeology of cemeteries, contested histories

• Legal, ethical, and governance questions around post-mortem rights, data, and space
   

Submission Guidelines
 

Please submit a 300-word abstract for individual presentations. Include a short bio (150 words) and information if you need a bursary covering travel expenses.

Send your submission to ive.brissmanctr.luse by 1 October 2025.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 10 October 2025.
 

Information
 

The conference will be held at the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University in southern Sweden. The city of Lund is in the Öresund region and is easily accessible by commuter trains from Copenhagen airport. 

We will be able to offer a limited number of bursaries for European (above all early career) scholars presenting papers at the conference.

The conference is part of the research project ‘Cemeteries of the Future’ generously funded by the joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology at Lund University.
 

Contact
 

For questions or further information, please contact: ive.brissmanctr.luse or erik.sidenvallctr.luse (project PI).

Website: Cemeteries of the future | Centre for Theology and Religious Studies