Dr Sally Raudon

  • ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow
  • Office hours: appointment by email
Dr Sally Raudon

Contact

About

I’m a social anthropologist. I focus on political, medical, and urban anthropology and I’m interested in the interaction of the body with politics and medicine. My research focuses on death, care, ritual, memory, absence and forgetting, citizens and the state, law and policy, massed graves, and memorialization. I have published on death rituals; the Crown, sovereignty, and constitutional reform in Commonwealth settler societies; and austerity in Europe.

My doctoral research focused on Hart Island, New York City’s massed grave for its unknown, unclaimed, and poor. This fieldwork coincided with the first and second waves of Covid-19 in New York. Approximately a million people have been buried on Hart Island since 1869 in unmarked trenches. It still operates today, burying about 1,500 New Yorkers each year. The island is uninhabited, and until 2020 all the work was performed by inmates from nearby Rikers Island Prison. Burials occur without ceremony or memorialisation. For decades, public access was prohibited, and it remains difficult for mourners to visit. I examine how the phenomena of contemporary mass burial can be made tolerable, or even ordinary; how, if burial acts out a person’s political claims of belonging, citizenship can survive death; and how the curious case of Hart Island speaks both to studies of massed graves following conflict, and to historical paupers’ burials.

My current project on lonely funerals examines the relationships prompted by changes to how people die. When someone dies without anyone to take care of them, is that because they have no social relations, or because their relationships are not recognised? Again, I analyse dislocations of death to ask, what does death reveal about social life?

Previously I was a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate in social anthropology at Cambridge, a research fellow at the University of Auckland, and a Teaching Fellow (lecturer) at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. I am a Churchill Fellow (New Zealand, 2010).

I am a member of the Afterlives Network, a collaborative group of scholars, activists, and practitioners focused on understand the social and political impacts of the missing and the dead.

 

Research

Research interests

  • Citizenship
  • The state
  • The body and death
  • Sovereignty in settler states
  • Europe
  • Austerity

Publications

Submitted

  • Forthcoming: with Bennett, Caroline. The corpse. In The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of the Body. Adeline Masquelier and Andrew McDowell, eds. Cambridge University Press.
  • Forthcoming: Out of the ashes in New York City: Cremation in Covid-19’s first wave. In Death and Institutions. Kate Woodthorpe, Bethan Michael-Fox, Helen Frisby, eds. University of Bristol Press, for the Death and Culture series.

Published

  • 2022. Huddled masses: the shock of Hart Island, New York. Human Remains and Violence 8(1): 84—101. Special issue: Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19.
  • 2021. Hart Island and the paradox of redemption. Gotham. The Gotham Centre for the study of New York City History at CUNY. [article]. June 3, 2021. https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/hart-island-and-the-paradox-of-redemption  
  • Shore, Cris, Sally Raudon and David V. Williams (eds). 2020. The Crown and Constitutional Reform. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
  • ⎯ Shore, Cris, Sally Raudon and David V. Williams. Introduction. Pp. 1—14.
  • ⎯ Raudon, Sally. Locating the Crown in Australian social life. Pp. 67—78.
  • McManus, Ruth, Jon Cornwall and Sally Raudon (eds). 2020. Death Down Under: An Anthology of Death in Australasia. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  • 2019. In The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Post-Colonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. In C. Shore and D. V. Williams (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • ⎯ Indigenous peoples and the Crown: The sacred duty. Pp. 75—98.
  • ⎯ Locating a local crown: The swag of Camp Gallipoli. Pp. 122—144.
  • ⎯ The Queen is Dead! Long Live the King? Pp. 224—244.
  • ⎯ Patel, Jai and Sally Raudon. Localising the crown: (Re)patriating royals and invented traditions. Pp. 145—162.
  • ⎯ Shore, Cris, David V. Williams and Sally Raudon. Conclusion: The Future of the Crown in an Age of Uncertainty. Pp. 245—269.
  • Raudon, Sally. 2019. Funerals in Aotearoa New Zealand. In Exploring Society: Sociology for New Zealand Students. 4th edition. Pp. 258—261. R. McManus, S. Matthewman, C. Brickell, G. McLennan, and P. Spoonley (eds). Auckland: Auckland University Press.
  • Shore, Cris, Sally Raudon and David V. Williams, (eds). 2018. Special issue on the Crown and Constitutional Reform in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs. DOI: 10.1080/00358533.2018.1504185.
  • ⎯ Shore, Cris, S. Raudon and D. V. Williams. Introduction: The Crown and Constitutional Reform. Pp. 1—4.
  • ⎯ Raudon, Sally. Locating the Crown in Australian social life. Pp. 463—474.
  • Raudon, Sally and Cris Shore. 2018. Greece, Austerity and European Integration: Temporality, Democracy and the EU Project. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 27(1): 64—83. DOI: 10.3167/ajec.2018.270111
  • Shore, Cris and Sally Raudon. 2018. Performing austerity: Greece’s debt crisis and European integration. In The Global Life of Austerity: Comparing beyond Europe. T. Rakopoulos (ed). Pp. 32—47. New York and London: Berghahn.