Parin Dossa

(Re)Imagining the Integrity of Life and Death: Ethnographic Narratives of Aging Muslims in the Diaspora

Dr. Parin Dossa, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, received her education on three continents: Africa, Europe, and North America. Her long-standing interest in displacement and critical feminist ethnography has led her to focus on the interface between social inequities, health, gender, and social palliation. She grounds her analysis in methodologies that capture the reconstitution of lives on the margins of society. This orientation questions the conceptualization of the local and the every day as discrete from the body politic. Her published works include Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work (2017, ed. Dossa, Parin and Coe, Cati), Afghanistan Remembers: (2014), Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds: (2009), Politics and Poetics of Migration: (2004). Social Palliation: Canadian Muslims' Storied Lives on Living and Dying (2020), nominated for New Millennium Book Award, Society for Medical Anthropology.

This interactive presentation explores the intricate interconnection between living and dying. For insights, we will draw upon the storied lives of aging Canadian Muslims as they work through experiences of emplacement that speak to their social and structural inequities, aspirations and hopes. Of critical importance is their mapping of a caring and humane society, affecting a paradigm shift from palliative care to social palliation. The co-joined unit of life and death, also highlighted through poetics and rhythms of sacred traditions, generates the question: What is it like to be awakened to human/nature existence? Insights raised by research participants will be reflected upon for policy reform and social change from an overly bio-medicalized focus that tends to fragment life from death and remains detached from socio-political and historical forces engulfing the lives of socially marginalized persons.

Please find the recording of the lecture through this link.