I did not know Professor Jason Arday.

Until a few days ago, his was not a name that belonged to my intellectual world, my professional networks, or even my passing familiarity with academia beyond my own corners of it. I came to know him, as perhaps many others did, when his name became a headline.

And then I began reading.

Not only the news reports, but the words circulating around them: LinkedIn posts, reflections, fragments of anger and grief, memories offered by people who had known him or known of him long before I did. I found myself particularly drawn to the responses of academics from racialised backgrounds. There was something in the way some of them wrote that exceeded the reporting of a death. Their words carried recognition. Hurt. Anger. Sometimes exhaustion. As though this particular loss had disturbed something that had already been sitting uneasily beneath the surface.

Their responses stayed with me.

Because something in them was familiar.

I am not yet ready to tell that part of the story. I have my own testimony about what it means to be doubted, diminished, gaslit; about inhabiting academic and professional spaces as a woman, as a woman of colour, as a woman whose faith also enters the room with her whether she names it or not. That testimony matters, and I will return to it.

But before testimony, another question has been sitting heavily in front of me.

Whose life is grievable?

And, perhaps more troublingly, when does a life become grievable?

Is it only when that life has been lost?

Judith Butler has been hovering at the edges of my thinking since I began reading these responses. In Frames of War, Butler asks us to think about the unequal ways in which lives become recognisable as lives that matter: lives whose loss would count as loss, whose disappearance would call forth grief, whose vulnerability makes a claim upon us.

Butler’s (2016) formulation is unsettling:

“Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters (p. 14).”

I keep returning to that final proposition: grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.

Butler develops this thinking through war, violence and the differential valuation of human lives, and this is very much extendable to everyday life. I find myself carrying the question to the quieter territories of everyday life. To workplaces. Universities. Corridors. Meetings. Emails. Decisions made behind closed doors. Professional relationships. Public judgements. The thousand ordinary encounters through which some people are reassured that they belong and others slowly learn that their pain will require explanation.

Because if grievability precedes death, as Butler (2016) suggests, then it must also tell us something about living.

Perhaps the question is not only whose death moves us.

It is also whose exhaustion concerns us. Whose humiliation disturbs us? Whose account of injury we believe? Whose vulnerability compels care rather than suspicion? Whose pain causes a room, a colleague, an institution to stop and ask: What is happening to this person?

And whose pain is instead met with:

Are you sure?

Perhaps you misunderstood.

It probably wasn’t meant that way.

Could there be another explanation?

Oh, that was a long stretch…

You may be taking this too personally.

There is a profound distance between a life that is biologically living and a life that is socially apprehended as mattering.

Butler (2016) puts this more starkly:

“Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life (p. 15).”

The sentence troubles me, and troubles me deeply.

Because it asks us to consider the possibility that grievability is not bestowed at the grave. It is distributed much earlier—in the attention we give, the testimony we accept, the suffering we recognise, the conditions we create for another person not merely to persist, but to flourish.

And so, reading about Jason Arday, reading the grief and anger of people for whom his story resonated in ways I could only partly know, I found myself returning to a question that feels both deeply political and painfully ordinary:

Do some people have to be lost before we recognise that they were grievable all along?

References:

Butler, J. (2016). Frames of war: When is life grievable?. Verso Books.