04-05-2023, 16:30-17:30 
H204, Humanities Institute, UCD

This presentation is about the performativity of the statement “Suicide Contagion is Real” that occurs on the first pages of a document called Reporting on Suicide: Recommendations for the Media published by the International Association for Suicide Prevention. This document functions as a guideline for media professionals. Its aim is to prevent “vulnerable individuals” from being negatively influenced by media coverage on suicide. The claim of “Suicide Contagion” suggests that certain ways of reporting on suicide cause the audience of such reporting to become infected or contaminated by suicide. This presentation inquires into the bond that is set up between suicide on the one hand and contagion on the other. It wonders in what ways “Suicide Contagion” becomes real, how it crosses the thresholds between scientific and cultural discourse, and in what ways its reality is mobilized to enforce measures seeking to immunize the public against the contaminative effects of the media.

Dr Ilios Willemars is assistant professor in cultural analysis, film and literary studies at the Centre for the Arts in Society at Leiden University. Ilios is currently working on the cultural response to HIV/AIDS in art, activism and theory, and has previously worked on digital representations of human bodies in video art, surveillance at airports, the work of Franz Kafka, and animals that commit suicide. Ilios is also editing a volume on the concept of replacement, has recently helped edit a book of poetry, and has done some work as a curator in Lisbon. Their most important mission as a teacher is to help students learn how to read for details and silences in texts and allow them to recognize theory as poetry and poetry as thought. An eclectic list of research interests follows here: bio- and necropolitics, data and digital media, replacement and placeholders, contagion and contamination, queer and feminist theory, sacrifice and death.

PRESENTATION: “Suicide Contagion is Real”: performative protection against contagion

A new interdisciplinary research network about viruses, microbes and the art we make about them! Convened by Mathieu Bokestael and Phoebe O'Leary at University College Dublin

UCD Viral Imaginaries Network