Listening out for the Dead: Biographical Research As Direct Witnesses Are Passing

For four decades, biography-and-society research has asked how lives and society are bound together. Today this question presses from two directions. Direct witnesses to twentieth-century violence and disaster are passing, one by one, new firsthand testimony diminishing with each loss. Meanwhile, naked violence floods the present, leaving its dead ungrieved and unrecorded. To turn toward the dead is therefore not looking back on a settled past but confronting a present problem.

What can biographical research contribute? While history reconstructs events and memory studies traces remembrance, biographical research attends to the texture, continuity, and afterlives of a life. We propose a shift: from treating the dead as records to be preserved toward reading a life—dead or living—as ongoing expression in narrative, silence, objects, and place, continuing after death through its traces and relations. We call this a bio-graph: not a written biography but the dispersed inscription of a life across the worlds it touched.

Two writers clarify this. Han Kang, the 2024 Nobel laureate, refuses to part from the dead of the Jeju April 3 massacre; Ishimure Michiko, who chronicled Minamata’s victims, listens for and writes with its dead. In both, mourning becomes not an end but a force for living on.

A sociology for turbulent times must imagine futures not by leaving the dead behind but by listening out for them. We welcome contributions from those working alongside the bereaved and survivors, and those listening with the archives, places, and objects through which the dead continue to speak.