Project description
The global politics of sodium pentobarbital
Sodium pentobarbital (SP) is a drug used in voluntary assisted dying that is also used in state executions, yet the systems governing its circulation, and the lives and deaths it shapes, remain poorly understood. The ERC-funded MORTALMED project sets out to understand SP’s global social trajectory, tracing how it moves across different worlds of dying. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Switzerland, the United States and Mexico, the project follows SP from assisted dying clinics to prisons and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals markets. MORTALMED shows how access to SP, and the kinds of deaths it makes possible, are deeply shaped by socio-economic inequality and racial disparities in the politics of dying.
Objective
MORTALMED is an anthropological project that investigates the global movements and local uses of sodium pentobarbital (SP) as a pharmaceutical that is employed primarily to facilitate both voluntary and coerced death. Using a mixed-methods approach, MORTALMED reassembles the social life of SP, focusing on how its life-cycle intersects with historically and culturally situated forms of governance and emerging necro-socialities—spaces of sociality where death is actively managed, governed, and produced. The project traces SP’s circulation across three key contexts: (1) assisted dying in Switzerland, (2) state-sanctioned executions in the United States, and (3) its over-the-counter commercialisation in Mexico. These practices reveal how pharmaceuticals intersect with legal, medical, and political systems, governing life and death unevenly across varied socio-political landscapes. By focusing on SP as a pharmakon—both remedy and poison—the project uncovers how pharmaceuticals function beyond health contexts, exposing the broader socio-political dynamics and power structures that both shape and are shaped by their use. MORTALMED seeks to unveil how SP’s movement through formal and informal networks reflects and reinforces socio-economic and racial inequalities. By reassembling SP’s socio-cultural biography, the project offers a critical perspective on how pharmaceuticals contribute to the governance of life and death, providing insights into the contemporary and future implications of pharmaceutical-mediated death.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
G12 8QQ Glasgow
United Kingdom
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