Against rectitude: Reimagining cemeterial spaces through a postural ethics

Population expansion and longevity mean that as more people are living longer, the world is generating increasing numbers of dead bodies. This results in the practical challenge of how to ‘organize’ an increasingly large volume of human remains in ways that are ethically responsible. Enduring beliefs about how the dead should be cared for shape relevant practices which, in turn, reflect wider values orientated largely towards the primacy of the individual. Yet burial spaces organized on the basis of individual, in perpetuity plots are under increasing strain and many are expected to be full within the next decade. This raises the urgent question: How should organizations, and wider societies, navigate the growing shortage of burial space and what, as organizational researchers, might we contribute to this? In this paper, we emphasize the importance of framing this question not simply as a logistical problem, but also as an ethical one. Through affective accounts of cemeteries in the UK and Italy and informed by feminist ethics, we examine how current burial norms call for a rethinking of the values underpinning how burial spaces are organized. Such a rethinking, we suggest, could open up possibilities for imagining more sustainable ways of organizing cemeteries, now and for the future. The paper contributes to organizational research on space by conceptualizing cemeteries as organizing spaces that materialize distinct ethical orientations. In doing so, it also connects scholarship on ethics and relationality to organizational space, foregrounding commemoration as an organizational practice in need of an ethically informed reimagining.