Toward a sociology of loss and life

This introduction to the special issue advances a sociology of loss and life, positioning death and mourning as both analytical and methodological tools for apprehending the social and interrogating its ontologies and epistemologies. The essays gathered here contribute to broader calls for critical, intersectional, transnational, and decolonial understandings of loss, situating death and mourning as inseparable from questions of power and its modalities, as well as from desires for social transformation—of damaged pasts and futures yet to be realized. Bereavement, bio-death, and mourning emerge not solely as sites of rupture, but as arenas of struggle, lived experience, and life-making. In this light, the social is constituted as much through loss as through life.