Mediating mourning: overcoming distance through sensitive thano-technological design
Speaker: Dr Hannah Gould
Affiliations: DeathTech @ UOM and the Centre for Palliative Care @ St Vincent’s Hospital
When: Thursday 19 August, 3:30-4:30pm
Format: 30 minute presentation & 30 minute open discussion via Zoom
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/hades-mediating-mourning-sensitive-thano-technological-design-tickets-165865055847
Abstract: This paper draws on ethnography of contemporary funeral services and columbaria in East Asia to explore how digital technologies are increasingly being used to replicate, supplement, or enhance experiences of memorialisation and mourning. These developments respond to social distancing in an age of Covid-19, and to other, longitudinal challenges to conventional death culture. How do we make the dead ‘present’ in digital modes? How is an encounter between the living and dead transformed (sensorially, socially, soteriologically, etc.) through the affordances of new tech? To answer these questions, I employ theories of religious materiality that frame artefacts as mediators between worlds, to analyse and better design technological interventions in the deathcare space.
Bio: Dr Hannah Gould is a cultural anthropologist and Research Fellow with joint appointment with the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne and the Centre for Palliative Care, St Vincent’s Hospital. Her work is concerned with death and discarding, technology, and religion. Dr Gould’s research spans new traditions and technologies of death rites, the lifecycle of religious materials, and modern minimalist movements. In sum, I study the stuff of death and death of stuff.
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Thank-you Hannah for a fascinating discussion of death rituals, the needs of the living and the dead from funerals, and the long lineage of zoom funerals in the human history of memoralising the dead.