Abstract
This article explores how narrative-based pedagogies can offer ways of thinking with absence amid the complex realities of extinction in the Anthropocene. It focuses on fabulatory forms of retelling—narratives in which entangled destinies bind humans and more-than-humans, and where death is not passively admitted or rendered silent. The central question posed is: How can the memory of the departed ones remain alive in the shadow of extinction? I argue that to engage meaningfully with memory in these times requires soliciting the dynamic presence of the dead, which involves listening to how they call upon the living and teach through their invitation to respond. To do so, I draw on Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret to address how the disappearance of countless living beings can influence our lives after their death, and how these absences can become sites of learning, guiding us toward the possibility of more just multispecies futures. This demands a shift in how death is understood, not merely as a definite closure, but as an ethical invitation to continuity, to “making-memory with” the dead in ways that counteract forgetfulness and rekindle connection in the face of amnesia. Crucially, this reimagining of pedagogical encounters with the dead has significant implications for death education grounded in ecological justice. It requires an educational praxis that recognizes remembrance as a political act, one that resists the erasure of marginalised lives, honours multispecies death, and fosters solidarity across boundaries of time, species, and modes of being. By learning to live with these absences and from them, educators can create spaces where loss becomes a generative force for collective response-ability, critical inquiry, and transformative justice.
Keywords
We must live well with the dead if we are to live well at all.
Margrit Shildrick (2020: 178)
Introduction
In the current context of increasingly severe environmental crises, research on ecological death, extinction and the collapse of socio-ecological systems has grown considerably, particularly in the humanities, as evidenced by subfields, such as Extinction Studies (Rose, 2011; Rose et al., 2017; Van Dooren, 2014) and Queer Death Studies (Lykke, 2022; MacCormack et al., 2021; Radomska et al., 2019, 2020; Shildrick, 2020). However, very rarely have discussions on ecologies of death found their way into the heart of educational theory and philosophy (Bengtsson, 2019), although some notable references in the field of Environmental and Sustainability Education exist (Affifi and Christie, 2019; Greenwood and McKee, 2020; Johansson, 2022; Russell, 2017). A widely recognised explanation for this neglect is the denial of death in European and settler American contexts (Madelin, 2022; Rowe and Mathews, 2021), which makes it difficult to address this subject both in educational circles and in wider societal discourse. Moreover, in the current era, often referred to as the Anthropocene, dominant cultural frameworks, particularly those shaped by industrialized, capitalist societies, are witnessing a transformation in how death is understood (Walter, 2022). It is increasingly perceived not solely as a personal or human-centred experience, but as a large-scale phenomenon driven by necroeconomic regimes of extraction and destruction for profit—regimes that produce death across species, ecosystems, and planetary systems, revealing at the same time the intricate interdependence of life forms and losses at multiple scales (Grimaldi, 2024). These various challenges do not mean that the subject should be avoided. As Ramsey Affifi and Beth Christie (2019) argue, to fully embrace sustainability, we must tackle its opposite: decline, dying and death—in their words, “human life and ecological health require experiencing unsustainability too, and a pedagogy for life necessitates a pedagogy of death” (1141). Drawing on their efforts to develop such a pedagogy attuned to our times, this article seeks to explore the pedagogical dimension and importance of the dead, considering not only what they can teach the living, but also how we – especially educators, students and artists – might respond.
Against this backdrop, this article proposes an educational configuration centred on the idea of learning to live with the dead, exploring the possibilities of educational encounters with them and the lessons they can teach us. This is not meant metaphorically but as part of an ethical, affective and material engagement with non-human entities, histories, and futures. In particular here, I focus on the more-than-human (rather than human beings as such) 1 who have fallen victim to ecological injustices of anthropogenic extinction. This form of extinction, characterized by Deborah Bird Rose as “double death” (2006: 75), entails the intertwined occurrence of biological demise and the loss of memory. The notion of forgetfulness (through biological and memory death) is the underlying conflict that I wish to emphasize, as it poses challenging questions for education (its discourse and practices) such as its role when the living, not to mention the not-yet-born, have no memory of the land, nor of the animal, plant and mineral life that once occupied it, due to the irreversible alteration of ecologies (Tsing et al., 2017). At the heart of my discussion is the following question: How can we cultivate connections and attachments without resorting to experience or personal memory, especially when collective memory is manipulated by dominant modes of representation or erased by capitalist power and other systems of injustice destroying these very memories?
As one response to this vast and pressing issue, I propose to develop ways in which to support, foster and nurture connections with the dead through the co-activation of their memory, facilitated by death narratives and artistic practices. In engaging this task, I turn to the work of Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret, 2 specifically Our Grateful Dead (2021; [2015]), and Les Morts à l’Oeuvre (2023, presently only available in French), which introduce non-normative conceptions of death into contemporary continental thought and critical appraisals of the dominant Western theory of mourning. Despret is one of the thinkers providing key insights into how the dead exert influence on the daily lives of the living and call for a response. Even though she is not centering her work within a framework of pedagogy, her theoretical and methodological approach offer educational research a unique way of addressing the question of how we are connected to the dead irrevocably, and the necessity to reckon with their lingering presence.
Mobilising her work as a theoretical reference, I consider “aesthetic encounters” (Todd, 2020) with and through those who have unjustly died, in a way that supports both new “social imaginaries of death” (Shildrick, 2020) and the desire to build more just multispecies futures, in which all those who are left behind are not forgotten. As we shall see, the materialization of these encounters requires de-investing from binary thinking that rigidly separates life from death. Indeed, for Margrit Shildrick (2020), abolishing clear-cut divisions between life and death is a sine qua non condition for living well with the dead to whom we owe an “ethical response” (182). The ethical dimension, she explains, does not only include political responsibility (state-led intervention and recognition), but must also tend towards a radical redefinition of existence: not circumscribed by the limits of individual life, but arising from continuous and dynamic coexistence and interrelations in which life and death are ontologically linked. This is significant in the context of education in precarious times, when education is understood as an “intensive ethical journey” of “finding better ways of living together” (Bazzul, 2023: 4)— an educational process, which, I argue, implies an engagement with the presence of the dead, involving inquiry into how they interpellate the living, what insights or lessons they transmit, and the forms of responsiveness they invite. Such an orientation arises not from a view of education as a merely technical enterprise of teaching and learning (as criticised by Biesta, 2009, among others) but as a profoundly existential and ethical undertaking, bound up with questions of life and death, and shaped by a prevailing climate of anxiety and despair in the face of current and imminent losses.
This relational, vibrant, and, indeed, uncanny, approach to making kin with the dead inevitably challenges the deeply entrenched humanist foundations of Western education, grounded as they are in anthropocentric frameworks that prioritize human experience and knowledge over more-than-human perspectives (Snaza, 2015). In this regard, I consider this article to contribute to a growing body of work, particularly in the field of posthuman educational research, aiming to reimagine education beyond anthropocentrism and well-established binaries (e.g., life/death, human/more-than-human, teacher/learner, emotion/cognition) and advocating for an educational paradigm that recognizes the agency of other lifeworlds and creatures and their contributions to the reorganisation of the perception and production of human knowledge (see e.g., Beier and jagodzinski, 2023; Snaza and Weaver, 2015; Taylor and Hughes, 2016). More precisely, the present discussion hopes to illuminate how the memory of the deceased can shape contemporary life and inspire more just futures, and in this sense, may offer a valuable site of reflection for death education scholars engaged with questions of socioecological justice—an intersection that remains notably underexplored in current scholarship.
This article is organized into three sections, beginning with Despret’s (2021) initial critique of the “work of mourning” considered to be the most common theoretical psychological model imposed on Western individuals. It will then go on to sketching two of her key concepts—fabulation and fabrication— elucidating the agential quality of the dead and the spatiotemporal conditions to forge what she calls a “conducive milieu” (p. 10). This analysis is situated within the context of educational encounters with the dead in the Anthropocene. In the third, most consequential section, I present the potential for an ethico-political and educational space formed by the parameters of the “death narrative” (Hatley, 2000; Rose, 2012; Rose et al., 2017). As a particular form of “conducive milieu”, the death narrative is uniquely well-placed to redefine connections with the more-than-human dead, extending the question of what it means for the subject of education to be in ethical relationality with absence. Granting agency to the dead is in itself a narrative mode Despret follows, which I illustrate by drawing on the story of the obliteration of the last passenger pigeon, Martha. In this section, I present a few examples of death narratives and offer a brief reflection on their potential implications for “death education” 3 centred on ecological justice, which not only recognizes loss but also empowers students to resist cultural amnesia and actively engage with the realities of extinction and climate change.
Beyond the work of mourning
To anchor subjectivity in an ontological perspective of interconnectedness is one thing, but to argue for a sociality that includes the living and the dead is a more difficult endeavour. Yet this is exactly what Despret does, inspired by the work of French psychologist Magali Molinié (2006), who investigates situations in which the dead as social beings are integrated in the subject’s daily existence. Despret draws on Molinié’s critique of the widespread Freudian popularization of mourning as a process of detachment from affective ties with the deceased, the purpose of which is to refocus and reinvest oneself in other objects once the reality of raw loss has been accepted. The emphasis on the therapeutic task to overcome sorrow amounts, Despret argues, to a “sort of exercise in psychic protection of sole concern to the living” (2021: 3), effectively rendering the dead insignificant within the affective and epistemic relationalities that might otherwise acknowledge their presence. The dead – human or more-than-human (whether a habitat, a plant, or an animal) — is cast in a dichotomizing relationship to the living subject’s grieving ego eschewing possibilities to account for different modes of existence that are in relation to one another. Within this framework, the dead “have no existence except in the memory of the living” while “the [living] are bound to sever all contact with the departed. And the dead have no role to play, apart from being forgotten” (ibid.: 5). Confined within the totalizing narrative of mourning, the dead falls into oblivion, while the mourner’s only possibility is to turn towards the past, and paradoxically, this same past must be transcended for the mourner to progress in their grief, typically through predefined stages—none of which concerns communication or connectivity with the deceased (see also Lykke, 2022: 39–41). This psychoanalytical model expressly dealing with the subject’s loss rather than the relation reflects a normative and limited understanding of western definitions of mourning, death, and potential forms of life that might persist beyond death. It also enforces a neat divide between the dead and the living.
The work of mourning, as Despret (2021) suggests, presupposes a particular view of death rooted in a materialist and secular paradigm, inherited from the Enlightenment and the advent of 19th-century European modernity, solidified by major intellectual movements, including positivism, material Cartesianism and secularization. These legacies conceptualize the idea of death in teleological terms, contributing to the perceived rigid boundary between the living and the dead, an imaginary that, although historically contingent, continues to influence contemporary understandings. Yet, entertaining relations with the dead—through worship, rituals, offerings and other practices—is a pervasive cultural phenomenon. “The idea that the dead have no destiny other than nonexistence is evidence of a very local and historically very recent conception of their status. Death as something that opens only onto nothingness is certainly the least common idea in the world” (Despret, 2021: 4). Her critique of mourning is therefore fundamental for two reasons. Firstly, it problematizes the modernist/cartesian dead-living dichotomy and the belief that the dead remains locked in a static past, by exposing their reductive logic and proposing new possibilities for rethinking our relationships with them. It begins with taking “these beings seriously”, Despret asserts (ibid.: 54)—that is to say as social beings with their own particular modes of existence—allowing for a disposition of attentiveness and solicitude toward alterity. Secondly, through this approach, Despret effectively underscores the relational relevance of making “memory with the dead” (2023: 13, my translation)—a formulation in which the preposition with is crucial, for it emphasizes a process in which both are engaged in an active, present-orientated relationship. This aligns with environmental scholar Julie Gibson’s (2021) concept of “counter-memory”, an ethical stance rooted in “the refusal to forget” (29), which I return to in the third section.
Learning to live with the dead is grounded in this founding idea that challenges human exceptionalism by recognizing all living beings as part of an interconnected web of life where relationships—whether pedagogical, ethical, political, or otherwise— do not simply terminate with death but persist in ways that can guide and shape our actions in the present (see also Gibson, 2021). In essence, it encourages a broader perspective on how to engage with any entity, regardless of its species, after its death, thus enabling a richer understanding of our shared destinies, particularly when faced with individual deaths or the complex, dispersed processes of extinction. Learning to live with the dead, therefore, does not merely account for the destruction of bodies, and their mourning, but their (re)construction as part of an ethico-political and educational space constitutive of the present. What I believe the Anthropocene teaches us about death is that death resulting from ecological injustice must lead to non-supremacist and decolonized forms of relations and action—specifically, the kind of action queer death scholar Patricia MacCormack (2020) terms under the expression “mourning the earth” (102), and which Vargas et al. (2020) similarly invoke in their exploration of decolonising practices of mourning. Mourning here is
Aesthetic encounters with the dead
Despret (2021) articulates a compelling methodology for engaging with the dead, extending Shildrick’s (2020) premise that we must “live well” with those who are no longer with us. Her approach, intertwining empiricism with theory, frames the dead as puissances— a term borrowed from Gilles Deleuze, translated as “forces”— which confers an agential quality to the dead that yet does not allow them to act in the world as living subjects. Rather, they are conceived as enablers; they enable the living to do certain things. Despret refers to Deleuze’s definition of “ethological practices” to build her pragmatic methodology for studying the dead’s uncanny modes of existence. According to her, the appropriate register for considering how they continue to be present among the living and continue to shape the world—whether they are extinct species, toxic landscapes, dolphins killed by fishing nets, or a friend who has passed—is to question what they make us do, namely, the actions they compel us to take. So, instead of focusing on the question of essence that seeks to define “what they are” (132), her non-essentialist, relational approach is conceived as a form of attentiveness and response-ability (in the Harawayan sense, i.e., to render one another capable of response) that involves listening to the ways in which the dead continue to matter and to act upon the living. Concretely, she asks us to consider these types of questions: “What are they in need of? What do they ask for? What do they make other beings capable of? What makes for a good milieu for them and for those who have taken on the responsibility for their accomplishment?” (2021: 9). This shift in perspective means that it is the relation, rather than the sole individual experience of the survivor that counts, where the existence and needs of the dead give the living the means to act, but always “starting from them” (2023: 21, my emphasis, my translation).
Such an approach deliberately moves away from the sanctity of the past and sheer reliance on experience and, in my view, has pedagogical value given its focus on relational praxis. Indeed, to consider the dead not as fixed subjects of knowledge, but as interlocutors who can affect our practices, narratives, and response-abilities is to suggest an educational process. I consider this theoretical orientation to be the necessary basis for inciting us to study the pedagogical lessons of the dead and the modalities at our disposal to respond to them. This is where the specificities of what Despret understands as “conducive milieu”—i.e., the intertwined gestures of fabulation/fabrication—make sense. In the third section of this paper, I will bring both gestures into a discussion of the death narrative to examine its pedagogical relevance. Looking at it more broadly, the aim will be to emphasise the value of cultivating relationships with these present absences through death education orientated toward ecological justice, fostering resilience and active engagement in the face of environmental crises. But before that, it is necessary to unpack these intertwined gestures and why it matters educationally.
Fabulation/fabrication: The conducive milieu
In the context of death education in the Anthropocene, where uncertainty and interconnectedness shape our world, the act of fabulation becomes a crucial practice for rethinking our relationship with absence. Despret’s exploration of how people speak about their dead offers crucial insights here. Her interviewees’ cautious stance when speaking about the dead reveals a “regime of hesitation”, in which they employ tentative language, using expressions like “perhaps,” “as if,” and “maybes”, to prevent overly literal and categorical interpretations of their encounters. This hesitation acknowledges the necessity of “fabulation”, which highlights a deeper epistemological stance attuned to ambiguity and resists certainty— one that recognizes encounters with the dead not as moments of mastery but as temporary, situated crossings between different modes of being. Importantly, for Despret, these ways of speaking/experiencing do not reflect an illusory perception of reality. On the contrary, it is a manner of perceiving that actively generates reality, because ways of perceiving are not merely passive, but influence modes of being and doing in how we relate to the world, to each other and how we express our understanding of existence. This insight has profound implications for education, as it suggests a pedagogical orientation that embraces uncertainty and fosters imaginative, relational ways of knowing in relation to distinct coexisting realities.
Fabulation, in this sense, is a necessary practice for expanding understandings of reality, particularly in relation to the dead and the entangled relationships that exist beyond the limits and western habits of positivist epistemologies, which narrowly delineate what counts as “real” (see also Lykke, 2022: 168, 179). As Isabelle Stengers (2006) explains, fabulation is about “telling stories otherwise”, it “is not breaking with ‘reality’ but seeking to make it perceptible, making aspects of this reality thinkable and feel-able, aspects that are usually taken to be accessories” (Despret, 2021: 79). These stories—referred to as death narratives in the next section— offer ways of engaging with the presence of the dead, not as fixed representations of who they once were, nor as inert relics of the past, but as something that “becomes other, that is, on another plane” (Despret, 2021: 5). As such, fabulation enables the ongoing reweaving of ties with those who have died, generating narratives of (species) death and meaning, in the constitution of a present capable of sustaining an ongoing ecology of relationships. Such a relational approach is particularly resonant for ecologically-orientated death education, where our entanglements with more-than-human worlds demand new sensitivities and expanded modes of relationality.
The emphasis on fabulation also brings attention to the role of spatiality (more so than temporality) in Despret’s work, which shows how (pedagogical) relationships depend on the creation of material spaces that enable connection across different forms of being. “Wherever the dead are active”, she claims “places are designated – in a very concrete fashion” (Despret, 2021: 9). Thus, whether in a landscape, a particular site, a set of geographical coordinates, an object, or an artwork, the dead need to be instaured (ibid.: 7–10). This act of instauration, or alternatively, fabrication, is both affective and ethical, since “it engages the responsibility of the one doing the instauring, to welcoming a request” (7). In one of her typical turns of phrase, Despret would say that the dead make the living make space for them. Within this logic, the living’s capacity to respond to and offer the dead a supplement of existence serves, ethically, as an act of remembrance, and pedagogically, as a call for creative engagement—one that seeks to make space for the dead, either literally or figuratively (this indeterminacy is partly constitutive of the relationship). This approach suggests that learning is not just about knowledge transmission but about the creation of environments (or milieus) where new forms of coexistence and communication become possible. So, while this approach may include elements of mourning, it ultimately moves beyond it and towards building memory with, rather than moving on.
This work of fabrication is therefore indissociable from fabulation, which together instaure, or fabricate, such a “conducive milieu” for the dead to come into existence and make us do things. “The milieu is an opener of possibilities”; thus, it is not determinate, but “it is what leads to the dead’s realization, transitory, but certainly real” (2021: 32). In this sense, the milieu does not simply frame or contain but actively shapes what can emerge, allowing for an interplay between materiality, memory, and imagination. Indeed, as noted earlier, fabulation, is not synonymous with fictionalization. It rather refers to a specific narrative mode, which will be explored in the following section. Important to note here however is the idea that fabulation is not apolitical. It is deeply tied to imagination—the creative force that makes worlds and new realities possible. Its political significance, as Despret (2022) defines it, rests in its embrace of contingency: the ability to think that the world’s current state is not the result of necessity and inevitability, but of circumstance and chance. This perspective invites us to consider that things could have been otherwise, opening space to envision and strive for alternative futures, while acknowledging the legacies that have led to this present world suffused by unjust and premature deaths.
Despret’s argumentation is likely to resonate with broader concerns in death education oriented toward ecological justice that must grapple with the layered complexities of loss, and eco-anxiety, and the activation of response-ability and practices of remembrance. In presenting a telling example drawn from Icelandic cultural practices, where encounters with the dead are nurtured rather than foreclosed, or dismissed as superstition, she opens a space for thinking/doing education otherwise toward modes of learning that remain attuned to the storied, the elusive, and the forms of presence that unsettle dominant epistemologies of absence. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Iceland was the first country, at least on a national scale, to organise a ritualised ceremony with a more-than-human dead, namely for the Okjökull glacier in summer of 2019 (Quaglia, 2022). By bringing the more-than-human into the fold of human experience, such ceremonies allow for a new type of pedagogical encounter—one that crosses species boundaries and creates alliances beyond human-to-human bonds (Haraway, 2016). This process of fabulating and fabricating a milieu signals what kinds of relationships are possible and necessary, not only with human dead and their legacies, but also with the more-than-human, emphasizing the ethical and affective dimensions of our interactions with the planet, our ancestors, and our descendants. Such educational encounters with the dead exceed simple knowledge transfer, urging the creation and fabulation of expanded spaces for collective remembering, where mourning can become a catalyst for political mobilization (as claimed by MacCormack, 2020), and a generative force enabling the reimagination of coexistence amid the accelerating and uneven transformations of our world. This orientation, among other implications, helps reconfigure (death) education as a practice oriented toward fostering these ongoing relationalities, where learning becomes an act of responding to the invitations of the dead rather than mastering their meanings.
The death narrative as pedagogical tool for learning from the dead
Despret’s methodological framework resonates with the arguments put forward by Extinction Studies scholars (Rose et al., 2017) who argue that death must be understood not only as a biological event, but as a deeply cultural, ethical, and relational phenomenon. They write: Death, and the relationship of the living to the dead, is a necessary part of the intergenerational production and transmission of ways of life, of the instincts and cultures, the skills and knowledges, by which differently evolved animalities are able to be—that is, to create their worlds (2017: 10, my emphasis).
In other words, cultivating relations with the dead can facilitate intergenerational transmission and resist forgetfulness, without plunging into a catastrophist or nihilistic discourse that feeds the Anthropocene debate (Braidotti, 2013). Here, what I want to suggest is that “production” and “transmission” can be done by way of narrative-based engagements—as death narratives—placed into the category of fabulation as that which generates and fosters forms of knowledge that bridge seemingly disconnected worlds — worlds that are, in fact, intertwined.
The concept of the “death narrative”, first introduced by James Hatley (2000) and extended by Extinction Studies scholars (Rose, 2012; Rose et al., 2017), shifts the focus from Holocaust memory to more-than-human coextinction processes, focusing on the responsibility to engage ethically with lives unjustly or prematurely lost or extinct due to human actions. One of Hatley’s concepts, that of witnessing, is central for these scholars. Rose (2012), for instance, in her reading of Hatley, describes the narrative as a “gift from the dead” (131)— a legacy that binds generations in witnessing and ethical response across time and species. This gift is not passive; it demands an active, situated practice of bearing witness, one that carries ethical weight. Drawing on Hatley, Rose et al. (2017) write that witnessing is a mode that “is from the outset already seized, already claimed, by an obligation to those whose story we are attempting to tell” (14). The death narrative is not a purely human construct; it is always already owned by those for whom the storyteller attempts to account. In other words, stories of extinction and the dead are not ours to create freely but are activated by those who tell and listen. This resonates with Despret’s (2021) mode of narrativization, where the dead elicit a response to those who stay, opening pathways for learning from the dead rather than merely about. In Les Morts à l’Oeuvre (2023), she shows how with each particular death the living is offered the gift of response-ability: to reactivate what the dead cherished but were unable to complete in their lifetime. She writes: “The dead are endowed with the power to continue to act in this world, not only by helping the living to ‘do with this world’ but also by transforming it through the medium of a work” (p.13, my translation). The function of the fabrication of an artwork—whether textual or material— or, indeed, its narrative, is to “accomplish”, but not in the sense of accomplishment as a noun, which implies finality, but in the sense of its conjugated verb, accomplishing, as a collective, ongoing process of thickening who the dead were through shared stories.
A death narrative is therefore faithful to specific lives and contexts; it is not abstract commemoration or reduction to data, but it requires holding space for the singularity of each death, within their specific ecological and historical communities (Despret, 2021, 2023; Rose, 2012; Van Dooren, Rose and Chrulew, 2017). Rather than focusing on scale, the narrative approach emphasizes a depth of attention to singular stories embedded within complex histories, transcending the individual. In this light, death narratives create a textured, situated mode of memory-making—relational rather than nostalgic, responsive rather than prescriptive. They enact a form of witnessing that does not merely register death but transforms our ways of relating to it, compelling us to engage with the dead in ways that are ethically, politically and aesthetically attuned; a first move towards building an ethical relationship with death, extinction and the (re)activation of memory.
The power of fabulation in educational practice, I suggest, lies precisely in its ability to shape death narratives—creative storytelling that convey lessons from the dead by blending reality with speculative or imaginative accounts. The configuration learning from the dead (via narrative) takes on not only an ethical dimension but also an affective one, engaging not only with knowledge but also emotions and imagination. Pedagogically, this is valuable for it transforms scientific, data-driven teaching into compelling narratives (Hockert, 2020)— here, specifically, to communicating profound lessons ensuing that voices of the dead continue to influence the present life of students and their future.
The death narrative thus emerges as both truthful and fabulist. Read through these two intertwined approaches, it highlights the operations of fabulation and instauration—not as mere representations of the dead, or aesthetic allegories but as dynamic processes of creation and engagement. As Despret (2021) notes, “remembering is not a simple act of memory”, rather it is a creative act “involving fabulation […] and especially fabrication” (47) that depicts non-chronological unfurling of time and, and in its recounting, recovers memory from oblivion. This is the power of storytelling against the fleeting nature of memory: it lends itself to rumination, deploying its forces over times. In this regard, Despret (2021) writes: The stories of the dead are endless stories, deliberately endless, they can always be reopened, begun again. These are stories that welcome, that acknowledge that something calls for thought, which means hesitating and fabulating. Actively. Stories are experiments. They are the workshops where being is made. (13)
Hence, fabulation/fabrication — integrated into the ethical fabric of death narratives — works to sustain the memory of the dead, establishing the grounds for the never-ending task of not forgetting them and what we owe them, in a way that compels and holds us singularly and collectively. In this sense, the narrative can become an active, experimental act of remembrance in Gibson’s (2021) sense: the enactment of a “counter-memory”, i.e., a refusal to forget that underpins the ongoing response-ability to honour the dead, resist cultural erasure, and carry forward their teachings— one of which consists in confronting human complacency in the degradation of the environment and the destruction of other species (MacCormack, 2020). Within this context, narrative emerges as a pedagogical, cultural and political act that invites learners to imagine otherwise, to hold space for loss while affirming the possibility of more just and liveable futures. Learning from the dead thus becomes inseparable from broader educational commitments to “preempting and redressing the violence and oppression” (Gibson, 2021: 21) suffered by those who have died unjustly. In other words, this undertaking forms part of a continuous, relational educational project aimed at resisting collective amnesia and advancing memorial justice.
This approach, as exemplified below, is key for making challenging lessons on death and extinction resonate deeply, meaning that they do more than simply inform, but engage students on an affective and intellectual level, and perhaps even encourage ethical or activist commitment to the subject matter. As implied, the first thing educators must do to integrate these ideas into their pedagogy is to frame death not as an isolated or abstract concept, but as something intricately connected to environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, and the ongoing threats of climate change, where loss and relationality with the dead are entangled experiences that are both personal and collective. This may then spark reflections helping to craft lessons and narratives that extend beyond human-centered perspectives, pervasive in educational practices, moving away from the notion of a “bounded sovereign ‘I’ trying to come to terms with mortality” (Lykke, 2022: 10) and toward deeply affective, aesthetic encounters with the dead as relational others who matter.
Martha the pigeon, and further educational implications
A compelling illustration for how the voices of the dead resonate through the narrative mode is the story written by Despret (2017) “It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared” that features in the coda to Extinction Studies. Despret recounts the ending of Martha, the last female passenger pigeon, who died in 1914. Martha is an “endling”, namely, the “last individual known of a species” (Pyne, 2022: 2). Housed at the Cincinnati Zoo, both Martha and her mate, George, who died four years earlier, spent their final moments of existence as a species in captivity in a Japanese-style monumental-looking cage. “Forced to a skyless existence”, Martha and George decide, fabulates Despret as narrator, to “let this whole story end—leaving no descendant behind” (217). In imagining Martha and her companion’s refusal to reproduce, she insinuates that they knew their world had already reached an end. Perhaps they still had, in the depths of a memory of which animals have the secret and that they transmit without our knowing, the memory of massacres, rifles, and trees that people set in flames in the darkest of night? Did they have an intuition of what was and what will have been? That the sky had become a desert? That to be ten, or even a hundred, means to be alone when you are a Passenger Pigeon? 2017: 218)
This extract shows how Despret avoids what Lydia Pyne (2022) warns against: “unimaginative storytelling”, which solely focuses on death itself in stories about endlings and other dying creatures. Pyne explains that such simplistic and linear narratives can “do endlings a disservice by treating the endling organisms as interchangeable characters whose entire purpose is to die in order to move the story along” (11). In truth, these organisms’ stories are more than just “dead” and “tragic tales” (ibid.). The fabulatory approach, in Despret’s (2017) text, brings to life the extinct passenger pigeon through the eyes of its last two emissaries, revealing “the unique, sensual, living, warm, musical, and colourful point of view that the passenger pigeon created upon [the world] and with it” (220)—a perspective that today’s skies have now lost. In this way, students may also vividly be brought into awareness that loss for the world is also loss of human experience; in other words, the dimming of species diversity dims our own consciousness. As a gift for those who stay, the gift of the dead can then become a powerful reminder of the sheer diversity of earthly critters, diverse in their sensory, cognitive and bodied ways of singularly experiencing the universe, and their bringing the world into awareness from different angles (the birthing of taste, of smell, the miracle of sight, hues and colours, amid the million other sensuous capacities the earth gives rise to). This is a powerful teaching. It is not intended to evoke human pity over loss, however. Rather, it highlights how speaking on behalf of the dead can be an act of honouring both the mourned and their ancestors, whose generational lines were discontinued – a major ethical reorientation for Gibson (2021) to uphold the commitment to remembrance and ecological justice in death.
By communicating the complexities of a striking, enduring and singular absence poetically, the narrative induces a sense of connection with the reader. Encouraging a poetic approach, rather than merely categorising and generalising, allows educators to fruitfully illuminate how each story is unique in its specific details and mundane in its general features, impressing at the same time the urgent truth of irreversible “loss of lifeways” (Van Dooren, 2014). The implication for death education, seems to me, is to be able to take account of this insoluble tension: on the one hand, the need to face the general fact of loss and the state of the world becoming less abundant, less rich and less sentient in ways that escape human perception and understanding, and on the other hand, to create memories with the dead so that their unique stories are told to cultivate care and attachment toward those we do not know personally and who are dying. In this sense, learning from the dead, in this case from Martha, can both arouse curiosity for the beauty intrinsic to our experience of the world, and serve as cautionary narrative about the consequences of overexploitation and habitat destruction. 4 In other words, it is an admonition to be heeded within our conscientious thoughts, urging us to regain our reverence and respect for the diverse and complex forms of life that still surround us.
An important additional implication, as introduced above, is the necessity of integrating a (necro)political dimension (Mbembe, 2003, 2019) into narrative-based pedagogies. Engaging with death narratives from a situated, ethico-political approach is vital to a death education framework oriented toward ecological justice, since stories about the dead are never single and unidimensional, but are always multifaceted and entangled to histories of colonialism, violence and ecocidal economies (Pyne 2022; Rose et al., 2017). The extinction of the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) for example, is not merely the story of the vanishing of a species, but one bound to colonial settlement, land dispossession, and aggressive state-sponsored eradication campaigns that targeted both Indigenous people and native predators. The thylacine, hunted into silence, joins the ancestors and the erased, a lesson from the dead on the cost of domination, disaffection and disconnection from more-than-human worlds. Likewise, the destruction of ancient forests, such as the giant kauri of Aotearoa or the Amazon rainforest, carries within it the teachings of the dead. These are not just stories of arboreal death, but of lives entangled within long-standing extractive economies, where ecosystems were (and still are) exploited for colonial profit and global trade. The silence of these forests speaks, revealing what is lost when the living world is reduced to a resource. These narratives reveal how more-than-human deaths are often not natural or inevitable, but the result of specific human actions and ideologies, such as capitalist and post/colonial extractivism and violence. Learning from the dead in the Anthropocene should then always involve recognizing how species death, habitat destruction, and ecological collapse are shaped by particular human histories (responsibility is not equally distributed, as highlighted by Rob Nixon (2011)) and questioning how we might respond differently. Listening to the voices of the dead through narrative-based pedagogy can therefore expose how dominant narratives erase or sanitize these histories. Such an educational practice would intersect with a necropolitical framework that challenges existing power structures surrounding life, death, and memory (Mbembe, 2003, 2019), here in the context of the climate and ecological emergency. In this way, it would reveal how death education can become a site of resistance, offering a space for students to cultivate a politically engaged response to these crises, while confronting the structural forces that render certain lives disposable and unworthy of grief (Butler, 2004). As Gibson (2019) claims, what matters is not “just that we remember but how and why we remember the unjustly dead” (8). Therefore, equipping students to engage with these topics in ways that are simultaneously imaginative, intellectually rigorous, and politically aware could indeed foster a deeper sense of agency in refusing denials of extinction and mass eco-death. 5
Not only do I believe that death education must actively cultivate spaces for these narratives (textual and material), as they hold promising pedagogical potential. When centered on restoring a sense of beauty and fragility, they can guide students to reorient the terms of their actions and develop the affective literacy needed to navigate the uncertainties and horrors that these narratives grapple with (Affifi, 2020). But I also think we owe these stories to the unjustly dead victims. We owe it to them, because, as Despret suggests, being dead to no one is precisely the risk the dead endure: nothingness. Martha’s narrative is an expression of the importance of fabulist storytelling as both a continuation of life and a refusal to forget aimed at resisting the expansion of “double death” (Rose, 2006). Her story is told “as if” maintaining a sense of hesitation. In suggesting that she would have cared for a world teeming with complexity in form and sentience, implies that it is now the responsibility of those who remain to preserve the fragile worlds and life that is still left. Yet, this fabricated narrative remains fabulatory; we will never truly know. This tension underscores the delicate balance between continuing the work of the dead, while also confronting the ethical (and political) dilemma of appropriation (i.e., the challenge to celebrate and perpetuate the legacies of those who are no longer here without exploiting or distorting their life stories (see for a critique of this kind, Cameron (2008)). In actuality, these stories are potentials, not exhaustive tracks, they only materialize fragments of what the dead ask us to consider. In this way, the (re)telling of distinctive, diverse and at times contradictory fragmented narratives to a community makes the dead denser, more complete and, as Despret (2023) writes, it then becomes “our common dead” (20, my translation). For these various motives, these death narratives as part of a pedagogy of death can help fabricate shared, open-ended, fuller patches of memory, which in an important way, may open possibilities to enrich a sense of communality beyond the life/death binary. They do not merely deal with loss, but are a means of exploring response-ability, continuity, and the ethical work of remembering more-than-human lives that once shaped – and still shape – our shared world. In Despret’s wording, they are an art “of filling up their absence into something else” (Despret, 2023: 21, my translation), for they foster at once a process of keeping memory alive and make possible the recording of their vital wisdom.
Conclusion
Drawing on Despret’s theorization of the relational dynamic between the living and the dead, this paper has examined how death narratives can offer a potent space of pedagogical engagement, one that enables learning from the dead as a restorative act of refusal to forget. The creation of narratives hold unique potential for facilitating aesthetic and affective encounters with the dead that can challenge and expand our understanding of ecological (in)justice. This is an urgent educational problem, which I have only touched on to a limited extent: how can educators remain available to transmit these difficult existential and ethical lessons about life and death and accompany students in the face of endless, disturbing questions about what it means to witness and live in the shadow of the destruction of life on a global scale. This is why I believe that integrating death education within an environmental sensibility is essential— not only to create conducive milieus for remembering the deaths resulting from the harsh realities of climate change and extinction, but also to help students cultivate a mindset that values openness to otherness, action, and collective responsibility. Complementary research (as that of Rowe and Mathews, 2021) could explore how personal, collective, and societal attitudes toward death shape human responses to environmental issues and their potential contributions to socially-just ecological action.
At its core, this article has sought to highlight how the death of a singular existence can create space for new forms of communal, tangible relations—ones that affirm and deepen our connections to the world around us and foster the emergence of transspecies solidarity (Shildrick, 2020). This is not to say that we need death and suffering as a precondition for the development of these relationships; that would be a form of masochism, a dangerous justification of pain in the name of future benefit. Nevertheless, in the silence that follows death, lies the potential, however minimal, for transformative and affirming gestures of remembrance and resistance—creative and critical practices of counter-memory that can welcome the chaos of grief while opening space for renewed, radical connections to both life and death.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
