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Isabelle Perreault Professor - University of Ottawa Canada

• 01.04.2025-25.04.2025
  

  Unclaimed Bodies: a social and political autopsy.

  This research focuses on the phenomenon of unclaimed bodies in Quebec over the past two decades. While the vast majority of studies on the subject are based on medical and quantitative data, produced in other national contexts, this qualitative study will focus on two types of unclaimed bodies: 1) the anonymous deceased, whose identities and links with relatives are unknown, or whose family members are all deceased; and 2) the deceased, whose bodies are refused or unclaimed after the formal death notice has been sent to members of the extended family. Using coroner's inquests, ethnographic interviews and a literature review, this research aims to produce a "social and political autopsy" of unclaimed bodies, i.e. a) to collect and analyze qualitative data on unclaimed bodies (socio-demographic data, living conditions and circumstances of death) and b) to uncover the processes, discourses and different actors (experts, interveners, volunteers) involved in their treatment before and after death. 

  The aim of this research is therefore to gain a better qualitative understanding, in the social sciences and humanities, of the phenomenon of unclaimed bodies in Quebec. More specifically, we aim to produce a social and political autopsy of unclaimed bodies.

Isabelle Perreault is Associate Professor at the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa. She is currently working on two research projects: 1) biopolitics and the Canadian penal code, and 2) a sociological history of suicide in Quebec from 1763 to the present. These projects are grounded in archival material from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. In short, she is interested by how discourses from the realms of politics, religion, the media and science have shaped and managed so-called mental, social and deviant sexual behaviours in French Canada. She is an affiliated member at the Centre d’histoire des régulations sociales (CHRS) at UQAM and has a research axis at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Citizenship and Minorities (CIRCEM) at University of Ottawa. This research axis, Biopolitical issues and minority groups, questions Canadian biopolitics from traces found in archives, traces that emanate from the contact between an individual and a medical, judicial or police institution on (assisted) suicide, induced abortion, assisted procreation, sterilization, non-procreative sexual practices and others subjects. A close attention is given to minority groups, such as the francophone minority, and to groups who are seen has minorities because of their life conditions and histories.

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