'Memento Mori' Pedagogies: Exploring the Teacher's Relationship with Death

In the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the increased and vital attention on Black life mattering, university student protests for ceasefires, increased gun violence, and school shootings, this project seeks to understand an education living in and with the specter of death. Many have begun to focus on this necropolitical landscape's impact on the children within it, particularly how BIPOC, working-class people, and anyone's existence deemed otherwise from the norm struggle for support in these necropolitical systems. However, few have looked toward the teachers and their understanding of the impact and formation of their work in the necropolitical landscape of education. By intertwining stories from classroom teachers and categories from socio-political thinkers, this project offers a death-informed or Memento-Mori pedagogy that reveals the possibilities of a theory of education that thinks with and alongside death. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]