37.3020, FYI: Call for Book Chapters: Pushing the Boundaries of Life: Discourses on Body Preservation, Ageing and Death

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3020. Mon Sep 21 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3020, FYI: Call for Book Chapters: Pushing the Boundaries of Life: Discourses on Body Preservation, Ageing and Death

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Daniel Swanson <daniel at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 20-Sep-2026
From: Kim Grego [kim.grego at unimi.it]
Subject: Call for Book Chapters: Pushing the Boundaries of Life: Discourses on Body Preservation, Ageing and Death


Call for Chapters
Pushing the Boundaries of Life: Discourses on Body Preservation,
Ageing and Death
Editors: Kim Grego (University of Milan) and Simone C. Bacchini (The
British Library)
Proposals are invited for chapters to be included in a planned edited
research volume (we are currently in negotiations with Routledge)
exploring the discourses surrounding attempts to preserve, prolong and
extend human life – and, ultimately, to maintain a life-like body
beyond death.
The relationship between language and ageing, and between language and
death, has received increasing attention across linguistics,
communication studies, the medical humanities and the social sciences.
The aim of the proposed volume is to extend that scholarship by
concentrating on practices that challenge conventional distinctions
between youth and ageing, health and decline, life and death. It
approaches these categories not as self–evident biological states but
as concepts whose meanings, boundaries and ethical implications are
continually constructed and negotiated through discourse.
The volume is particularly interested in practices intended to delay
ageing, extend longevity or preserve the human body. These may range
from comparatively established forms of health and lifespan
optimisation to experimental or speculative technologies promising
radical life extension. They may also include post-mortem practices –
such as embalming, cryonics, plastination, mummification and digital
forms of persistence – that seek to preserve the body, identity or
appearance after biological death. The volume is also interested in
discourse around life after death from the point of view of religious
beliefs. Of interest, are the discursive practices used to talk about
it (for example in sacred texts), and the ritual language (e.g.
prayers and blessings) used to invoke and favour it.
Contributors are invited to examine how such practices are named,
described, justified, promoted, contested or regulated, and how
discourse negotiates their scientific credibility and ethical
legitimacy. Particular attention may be paid to representations of the
body; changing definitions of ageing and death; the medicalisation of
ageing; and the ideological, commercial and technological imaginaries
underpinning the pursuit of longevity or immortality.
Possible topics
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to:
- anti-ageing, longevity and lifespan-extension discourses;
- radical life extension and the representation of immortality;
- the construction of ageing as a disease, technical problem or
preventable condition;
- biotechnology companies and the commercial promotion of longevity
research;
- cryonics and other forms of post-mortem body preservation;
- embalming, mummification, plastination and the treatment of human
remains;
- historical changes in the conceptualisation of preservation, ageing
and death;
- scientific and medical representations of the boundaries between
life and death;
- legal, bioethical and public-policy discourses surrounding
life-extension technologies;
- media representations of emerging or controversial preservation
practices;
- transhumanism, posthumanism and technological futures;
- inequalities of access to longevity and anti-ageing technologies;
- gendered, racialised, class-based or ableist constructions of ageing
and bodily preservation;
- metaphors, narratives and terminologies of rejuvenation,
preservation and immortality;
- multimodal and visual representations of the preserved or
technologically enhanced body;
- digital afterlives, avatars and other forms of posthumous identity
preservation;
- public understandings and reception of speculative biomedical
innovation;
- life after death in religious discourse and practice.
Approaches and materials
The volume welcomes theoretically informed and methodologically
rigorous work in applied linguistics and discourse studies, including:
- corpus-assisted discourse studies;
- critical discourse studies;
- multimodal discourse analysis;
- conceptual history;
- lexicology, lexicography and terminology;
- genre analysis;
- narrative and metaphor analysis;
- historical and diachronic discourse analysis;
- health and science communication;
- religious studies, sociology of religion.
Interdisciplinary contributions drawing on bioethics, medical
humanities, death studies, ageing studies, science and technology
studies, media and communication studies, sociology, anthropology,
cultural studies, or the history of medicine and science are also
encouraged, provided that discourse, representation or communicative
practice remains a substantial component of the analysis.
Contributions may examine contemporary or historical materials and may
focus on any relevant geographical or cultural setting. Comparative
and cross-cultural studies are particularly welcome.
Submission procedure
Please submit:
- a provisional title;
- an abstract of approximately 400-500 words, clearly identifying the
research question, materials, theoretical framework and methodology;
- up to five keywords;
- a short biographical note of approximately 100 words for each
author;
- the authors’ names, affiliations and contact details.
Proposals will be evaluated on their relevance to the volume,
originality, methodological rigour, and contribution to a coherent
interdisciplinary discussion of bodily preservation at the
intersections of ageing and death.
Accepted proposals will be submitted to the publisher for final
approval. Once approval has been received, authors will be notified
and will have up to six months to submit their chapters. Chapters
should be approximately 8,000 words in length, including notes and
references, and must be original work that has not been previously
published or submitted for publication elsewhere.
Please send proposals and enquiries to both editors’ email addresses,
using the subject line “Pushing the Boundaries of Life – Chapter
Proposal” by 31 October 2026
About the editors
Kim Grego is Professor of English Language and Translation at the
University of Milan. Her research interests include Translation
Studies, specialised scientific, medical and political discourse,
Critical Genre Analysis, and Critical Discourse Studies applied to
ethically contested issues. Her recent research has focused on ageism,
end-of-life issues and the discursive construction of cryonics and
life-extension practices.
Simone C. Bacchini is a subject specialist in Arts and Humanities at
the British Library. His research interests include discourse
analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and health communication. He
is the author of An Introduction to Language and Communication for
Allied Health and Social Care Professions (Routledge, 2023).

Call Deadline: 31-Oct-2026

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Australian Linguistics Society https://als.asn.au/Home

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

MDPI Languages https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com

SIL International Publications http://www.sil.org/resources/publications


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3020
----------------------------------------------------------