In my PhD research, I study how South Sudanese communities have dealt with death away from home—what I call death mobilities—since the mid-nineteenth century and how this informs how urban-based South Sudanese families relate to their dead and manage multi-locality events in the funerary cycle today, from wakes to funerals to post-burial memorial events.
The rationale behind this dissertation project is that changes in mortuary practices and the management of dead bodies provide an original lens on how histories and present-day experiences of death are implicated in wider social processes of mobility, urbanity and medical care in South Sudan. I use a long-term historical approach to place twenty-first century death mobilities in a longer history of evolutions and innovations in death and mortuary practices and meanings and will combine archival research in the United Kingdom, South Sudan and Sudan with multisited ethnographic research in Juba and Khartoum.