ERC Starting Grant · 2025
Mortal Medicine: The Social Life of a Death-Inducing Pharmaceutical
MORTALMED is an anthropological project that investigates the global movements and local uses of sodium pentobarbital (SP) as a pharmaceutical that is employed primarily to facilitate both voluntary and coerced death. Using a mixed-methods approach, MORTALMED reassembles the social life of SP, focusing on how its life-cycle intersects with historically and culturally situated forms of governance and emerging necro-socialities—spaces of sociality where death is actively managed, governed, and produced. The project traces SP’s circulation across three key contexts: (1) assisted dying in Switzerland, (2) state-sanctioned executions in the United States, and (3) its over-the-counter…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.