Call for Chapters
Pushing the Boundaries of Life: Discourses on Body Preservation, Ageing and Death
Editors: Kim Grego (University of Milan) and Simone C. Bacchini (The British Library)
Proposals are invited for chapters to be included in a planned edited research volume (we are currently in negotiations with Routledge) exploring the discourses surrounding attempts to preserve, prolong and extend human life – and, ultimately, to maintain a life-like body beyond death.
The relationship between language and ageing, and between language and death, has received increasing attention across linguistics, communication studies, the medical humanities and the social sciences. The aim of the proposed volume is to extend that scholarship by concentrating on practices that challenge conventional distinctions between youth and ageing, health and decline, life and death. It approaches these categories not as self–evident biological states but as concepts whose meanings, boundaries and ethical implications are continually constructed and negotiated through discourse.
The volume is particularly interested in practices intended to delay ageing, extend longevity or preserve the human body. These may range from comparatively established forms of health and lifespan optimisation to experimental or speculative technologies promising radical life extension. They may also include post-mortem practices – such as embalming, cryonics, plastination, mummification and digital forms of persistence – that seek to preserve the body, identity or appearance after biological death. The volume is also interested in discourse around life after death from the point of view of religious beliefs. Of interest, are the discursive practices used to talk about it (for example in sacred texts), and the ritual language (e.g. prayers and blessings) used to invoke and favour it.
Contributors are invited to examine how such practices are named, described, justified, promoted, contested or regulated, and how discourse negotiates their scientific credibility and ethical legitimacy. Particular attention may be paid to representations of the body; changing definitions of ageing and death; the medicalisation of ageing; and the ideological, commercial and technological imaginaries underpinning the pursuit of longevity or immortality.
Possible topics
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:
- anti-ageing, longevity and lifespan-extension discourses;
- radical life extension and the representation of immortality;
- the construction of ageing as a disease, technical problem or preventable condition;
- biotechnology companies and the commercial promotion of longevity research;
- cryonics and other forms of post-mortem body preservation;
- embalming, mummification, plastination and the treatment of human remains;
- historical changes in the conceptualisation of preservation, ageing and death;
- scientific and medical representations of the boundaries between life and death;
- legal, bioethical and public-policy discourses surrounding life-extension technologies;
- media representations of emerging or controversial preservation practices;
- transhumanism, posthumanism and technological futures;
- inequalities of access to longevity and anti-ageing technologies;
- gendered, racialised, class-based or ableist constructions of ageing and bodily preservation;
- metaphors, narratives and terminologies of rejuvenation, preservation and immortality;
- multimodal and visual representations of the preserved or technologically enhanced body;
- digital afterlives, avatars and other forms of posthumous identity preservation;
- public understandings and reception of speculative biomedical innovation;
- life after death in religious discourse and practice.
Approaches and materials
The volume welcomes theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous work in applied linguistics and discourse studies, including:
- corpus-assisted discourse studies;
- critical discourse studies;
- multimodal discourse analysis;
- conceptual history;
- lexicology, lexicography and terminology;
- genre analysis;
- narrative and metaphor analysis;
- historical and diachronic discourse analysis;
- health and science communication;
- religious studies, sociology of religion.
Interdisciplinary contributions drawing on bioethics, medical humanities, death studies, ageing studies, science and technology studies, media and communication studies, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, or the history of medicine and science are also encouraged, provided that discourse, representation or communicative practice remains a substantial component of the analysis.
Contributions may examine contemporary or historical materials and may focus on any relevant geographical or cultural setting. Comparative and cross-cultural studies are particularly welcome.
Submission procedure
Please submit:
- a provisional title;
- an abstract of approximately 400-500 words, clearly identifying the research question, materials, theoretical framework and methodology;
- up to five keywords;
- a short biographical note of approximately 100 words for each author;
- the authors’ names, affiliations and contact details.
Proposals will be evaluated on their relevance to the volume, originality, methodological rigour, and contribution to a coherent interdisciplinary discussion of bodily preservation at the intersections of ageing and death.
Accepted proposals will be submitted to the publisher for final approval. Once approval has been received, authors will be notified and will have up to six months to submit their chapters. Chapters should be approximately 8,000 words in length, including notes and references, and must be original work that has not been previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere.
Please send proposals and enquiries to both editors’ email addresses, using the subject line “Pushing the Boundaries of Life – Chapter Proposal” by 31 October 2026
About the editors
Kim Grego is Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Milan. Her research interests include Translation Studies, specialised scientific, medical and political discourse, Critical Genre Analysis, and Critical Discourse Studies applied to ethically contested issues. Her recent research has focused on ageism, end-of-life issues and the discursive construction of cryonics and life-extension practices.
Simone C. Bacchini is a subject specialist in Arts and Humanities at the British Library. His research interests include discourse analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and health communication. He is the author of An Introduction to Language and Communication for Allied Health and Social Care Professions (Routledge, 2023).