The Social Autopsy

Abstract

The social autopsy takes the death of a set of individuals as its starting point and then critically and systematically examines social and political conditions to explain these deaths and generate awareness and policy change. After distinguishing the social autopsy from other means to explain excess and premature deaths, we delineate three core methodological principles of the social autopsy: social relevance as a guiding criterion to sample the deaths to be autopsied, embedding the patterning of deaths in social worlds, and a focus on contextual causality and social mechanisms. We provide three contemporary examples of excess deaths calling out for social autopsies: school shootings, Black deaths at the hands of police, and migrant border deaths.