CFP: CfP “Urban Deathscapes: Media, Spaces of Death, and the Contemporary City”

Mediapolis Themed Dossier: “Urban Deathscapes: Media, Spaces of Death, and the Contemporary City” (Vol. 11, No. 3)

Edited by Susana Viegas (NOVA FCSH/FILM AND DEATH)

Every city must negotiate the place of its dead. Cemeteries, crematoria, memorial parks, roadside shrines, temporary memorials, and other deathscapes form an often-overlooked layer of the urban fabric, revealing how societies negotiate memory, ecology, religion, politics, and everyday life. Whether depicting deathscapes as places of dwelling, as in Sérgio Tréfaut’ s "The City of the Dead" (2011), or as destinations of travel, as in Roberto Rossellini’s "Journey to Italy" (1954), media reveal the many ways in which spaces of the dead participate in the social, cultural, and political life of cities. Documentary and fiction films, photography, television, digital media, video games, and social media not only represent urban deathscapes but also influence how they are experienced, imagined, and transformed. 

This dossier seeks contributions that examine how media engage with urban deathscapes across historical and contemporary contexts. We welcome contributions from scholars working across film and media studies, urban studies, geography, architecture, anthropology, death studies, environmental humanities, memory studies, and related fields. 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Housing, everyday life, and communities in spaces of the dead;
• Tourism, pilgrimage, walking, and travel through urban deathscapes;
• Colonial cemeteries, military cemeteries, contested memorials, and unmarked graves;
• Green burial, biodiversity, and environmental transformations;
• Representations of urban deathscapes in cinema, photography, television, digital media, and video games;
• Heritage, ruins, archaeology, memory, and the coexistence of multiple urban pasts;

Please submit an abstract (maximum 300 words) and a short biography (maximum 100 words) to Susana Viegas ([email protected]) by 10 September 2026.

Authors will be notified shortly after the deadline. Full articles (maximum 3,000 words, including references, following the Chicago Manual of Style, notes and bibliography system) will be due 1 November 2026 and will undergo anonymous peer review.

Film and Death

Call for Contributions – Mediapolis