The CDAS conference 2026: death and power will take place from Wednesday 17 - Friday 19 June 2026. It will be wholly online to facilitate international attendance and promote accessibility.

Power, in all its forms, is central to the human condition, peoples’ relationships to others, the planet’s future, and how endings are experienced. Theorised across many, if not all, disciplines, power is inherent in professions, care, associations with others, policy and politics, perspectives and approaches, rationales and logic. Whether it is something possessed or negotiated, practiced or rejected, power in all its guises is part of life, and of death.

We welcome abstracts up to 250 words long by 9am GMT on Monday 2 February 2026 from academics, practitioners, policy-makers and others, that address the conference theme.

While any relevant topics are welcome, suggested topics include:

• Agency and empowerment
• Relationships, norms, negotiations and obligations
• Abuses of power
• Surveillance and regulation
• Inequality and marginalisation
• Colonialism/decolonialism
• Solidarity and resistance
• Extinction, environmental and planetary loss; more-than-human loss
• Assisted dying
• Ethics and morality
• Institutions and bureaucracies; networks and systems
• Emotion and sentiment
• Conflict and violence
• Professions, professionals and workforces
• The power of the dead and dead bodies
• Technology, bioethics and artificial intelligence
• Power in research, knowledge, language, conversation, narratives and discourses.
• Transhumanism

Format

We are keen to encourage opportunities to engage and share within our conference, and therefore seek abstracts for a range of formats, including:

• Individual paper - 20 minutes including questions, to be put into a 60-90 minute session according to theme and/or time zone
• Roundtable - 60-90 minutes, we recommend a maximum of 4 presenters recruited and coordinated by the roundtable organiser, and detailed in the submission, including agreement to contribute by all
• Interactive sessions or workshops - 60-90 minute sessions, using creative and/or visual methods, or clear opportunities for audience participation

Tips on writing your abstract:

We usually receive about 2-3 times as many abstracts as we have space for. To improve your chance of selection:

• make sure you explicitly and clearly address the conference theme.
• make sure that you describe your paper in a way that is easy for an interdisciplinary and international audience to digest. There will be practitioners, policy-makers and academics attending.
• ask someone who doesn’t know your work to have a look at your abstract. Do they understand what your overall argument for your abstract is?