ABSTRACT
What is social death? The term has been used by a wide range of scholars from different disciplines, working in different substantive fields, and – this article argues – not entirely consistently. The need for conceptual clarity is highlighted by the increasing, but often varied, use of the term. In the past six years, three substantial academic books (Cacho, 2012; Guenther, 2013; Norwood, 2009) have been published with social death in their title or subtitle. After briefly sketching the history of social science’s use of ‘social death’, the article analyses some key studies using the concept in order to identify its central components.
