Social determination of death: on the vulnerabilization and infeasibility of lives, necropolitics, and indifference

Abstract

This essay explores the “social determination of death” and addresses how the notion of "social determination" in health-disease processes, stemming from Latin American Social Medicine and Collective Health, when incorporated into the discussion about death, enables us to politicize and situate it socially, territorially, and historically. This perspective allows us to understand the social determination of death within power structures and as a reflection of the social inequalities that individuals experience throughout their lives, shaped at the intersections of race/color, gender, class, and other social markers, generating  vulnerability and unfeasibility of living.