DeathTech Research Team

The DeathTech Research Team is a group of anthropologists, social scientists and human-computer interaction specialists based at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. The team have been studying questions at the intersection of death, technology, and society for more than a decade.

Research Projects

The DeathTech Research Team is currently undertaking two major projects:

Disposal of the Dead: Beyond Burial and Cremation investigates emerging alternatives to and elaborations upon traditional methods of body disposal. Disposal of the Dead is a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council.
The Future Cemetery investigates the potential for new technologies to enhance the public’s experience of the cemetery. The Future Cemetery is a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council along with the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust as Linkage Partner.

Additionally, the team is currently undertaking a rapid-response research project on Remote, Restricted and Redesigned: Memorialisation practices and the COVID-19 pandemic, supported by seed funding from The University of Melbourne.

Project Details

Publications

To date, the DeathTech Research Team has produced two books (Death and Digital Media and Residues of Death: Disposal Reconfigured) and numerous other academic and popular publications that explore how death, commemoration and mourning have begun to change in response to the shifting technological and social pressures of the 21st century.

List of Publications

Latest News

Michael Arnold

Professor, History and Philosophy of Science, the University of Melbourne

Michael Arnold’s on-going research activities lie at the intersection of contemporary technologies and daily life; for example, studies of digital technologies in the domestic context, online memorials and other technologies associated with death, social networking, community informatics, and ethical and normative assessments of technologies.
Web

Tamara Kohn

Professor of Anthropology, School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne

Tamara Kohn’s current research focuses on creative practice, death studies, mobility and leisure, methods and ethics, and the anthropology of the body and senses, based on fieldwork in the US, Japan and Australia.
Web・ORCID

Martin Gibbs

Professor, School of Computing and Information Systems, the University of Melbourne

Martin Gibbs is a member of the Human-Computer Interaction research group. Martin is currently investigating how people use a variety of interactive technologies, such as video games, community networks and mobile phones, for convivial and sociable purposes in a diverse situations (intimate strong-tie relationships, local neighbourhoods, work-based occupational communities, online computer games).
Web・ORCID

Elizabeth Hallam

Associate Professor in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Oxford University

Elizabeth Hallam’s research and publications focus on the anthropology of the body; death and dying; material and visual cultures; human anatomy; three-dimensional models, especially in medical education; making and design; mixed-media sculpture; history and anthropology; experimental research with images and texts; fieldwork, archive and museum-based research mainly in the UK, along with recent multi-sited research begun in Australia, Singapore and the USA.
Web

Bjørn Nansen

Senior Lecturer, Media and Communications, the University of Melbourne

Bjørn Nansen’s research focuses on emerging and marginal forms of digital media use in everyday life, using a mix of ethnographic, participatory and digital methods. His current work explores changing home media infrastructures and environments, children’s mobile media and digital play practices, technologies for death and memorialising, and the digital mediation of sleep.
Web・ORCID

Samuel Holleran

PhD Student, Media and Communications, the University of Melbourne

Samuel Holleran’s PhD examines public participation in the reimagination of urban burial sites. He is also an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work examines the power and politics imbued in urban design. In particular, he is interested in the use of everyday objects in cities, like street furniture, parks, and signage. He has worked as an art director, researcher and educator in the field of civically-engaged design with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) in New York City and the Chair for Architecture & Urban Design at ETH-Zürich.
Web・Twitter・ORCID

Fraser Allison

Research Fellow, School of Computing and Information Systems, the University of Melbourne

Fraser Allison is a research fellow in the Human-Computer Interaction research group. He studies the design and user experience of technologies for leisure and commemoration, with a focus on natural user interfaces, complex user experiences and the ways in which people draw meaning from technologically mediated activities.
Web・ORCID・Twitter

Hannah Gould

Research Fellow, School of Social and Political Sciences, the University of Melbourne

Hannah Gould is a socio-cultural anthropologist working in the areas of death, religion, and material culture. Her research is focused on how the deceased are memorialised and materialised in everyday life, with a regional focus on North-East Asia.
Web・ORCID・Twitter

Industry Research Partners

Deb Ganderton

CEO, The Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust

Deb has masters’ degrees in Arts and Science, is a qualified foresight practitioner, a member of AICD, IAPP and president of IABC Victoria. Deb is currently the CEO of GMCT, a leading player in the Australian funeral and cemetery sector, who run 19 cemeteries and two sites yet to be developed on Melbourne’s urban fringe. GMCT’s 600 hectares of heritage parklands are visited by almost two million people each year.

Research Collaborators

The Future Cemetery

The contemporary Western cemetery, dedicated to the dead and their memorials, has become more than a pervasive urban landmark. It is also a central site in the emotional lives and cultural histories of local communities. However, this model is now facing crisis, driven by growing environmental concerns, maintenance costs, and an increasingly well-informed public with a complex range of desires for memorialisation.

Around the world, many cemeteries have begun adopting new technologies to improve their visitors’ experiences, reduce their facilities’ environmental footprint, and extend the personalisation of services in response to more diverse community desires. These include the potential for grave location, navigation, and tours, and for digital annotation or augmentation of interment locations. New alternatives to traditional cremation, burial, and mausoleums have also become viable, including resomation (water-based cremation) and natural burial. This project will identify and critically assess the potential of innovative technologies to enhance the public’s experience of the cemetery, diversify service offerings, and strengthen community connections, all in the context of increasingly diverse and rapidly changing social circumstances.

The Future Cemetery is a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council (grant no: LP180100757) with the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust as Linkage Partner.

Outputs:

The Encyclopedia of Cemetery Technology
Future Cemetery Industry Workshop 2019 Report
Future Cemetery National Survey 2020 Report
Future Cemetery Industry Workshop 2021 (forthcoming)
Future Cemetery National Survey Report 2021 (forthcoming)

Disposal of the Dead: Beyond Burial and Cremation

This research project investigates innovative and scalable alternatives to body disposal, such as alkaline hydrolysis, liquid nitrogen, and other thermal processes, and innovative elaborationson burial and cremation, such as natural burial and carbon trading among crematoria at a time when there is a greater awareness of the economic and environmental costs of both burial and cremation. It considers the social, cultural and environmental issues, regulatory challenges, institutional responses, public discourses, personal ethics, and worldviews at stake in the emergence of these disposal technologies. The research asks, how do innovations in these technologies impact on consumers, industry, and broader socio-cultural and metaphysical frameworks for handling death? This project explores the practices and perspectives of designers, death workers, industry intermediaries, consumers and representatives of cultural and religious communities as they respond to, interpret and plan for changing possibilities of bodily disposal.

Disposal of the Dead is a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council (DP: 180103148)

Remote, Restricted and Redesigned: Memorialisation practices and the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic not only represents a serious threat to human life and livelihoods, it has transformed experiences of death, grief, and memorialisation. Social distancing regulations have upended cultural and religious traditions by restricting interaction with the deceased, attendance at funerals, and visitation at cemeteries. Simultaneously, communities have found creative responses to restrictions through new rituals and uses of technology. At the heart of these disruptions and transformations are death care workers, who provide an essential service in the face of uncertainty but are often overlooked in official pandemic responses and media coverage.

This research tackles the problem of how to manage individual and communal expectations of death rites that uphold human decency and tradition, while continuing to protect death care workers under the conditions of a global pandemic and its aftermath. The team will assess the Australian response and formulate recommendations for improvement to funeral practices during and following pandemic, with a view to long-term research. Conducting this research now will ensure that the death care sector will be better equipped to deliver a safe and compassionate response during future disruptive events.

This project is funded by the Arts Collaborative Research Seed Funding Scheme at The University of Melbourne.

To take part in the survey of the death care industry for this project, please click here.

Digital Commemoration

The Internet is not just changing our social lives, it is also changing how we approach death and commemoration. The project provides an extensive analysis of contemporary digital commemoration and a detailed account of the wider social and cultural implications of these practices.

The ‘Digital Commemoration’ project brings together researchers from Anthropology, Human and Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Studies of Technology, and Media and Communications. The project will provide an extensive analysis of contemporary digital commemoration and a detailed account of the wider social and cultural implications of these practices. This research continues our previous work on digital memorialisation and the mediation of death online, which has been supported by research grants from the Institute for a Broadband Enabled Society (IBES) and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN).

Digital Commemoration was a three-year project funded by the Australian Research Council. For more information, visit the project website.

Books

Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., Kohn, T., Meese, J., & Nansen, B. (eds.). (2018) Death and Digital Media. London: Routledge.

Kohn, T., Nansen, B., Gibbs, M., & van Ryn, L. (eds.). (2019) Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured. London: Routledge.

Public Reports

Gould, H & Holleran, S. 2021. An Essential Service: Experiences of Australian Deathcare Workers during COVID-19. [Report]

An Essential ServiceDownload

Allison, F., Gould, H., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., Gibbs, M., and Kohn, T. 2020.The Future Cemetery Survey 2020 [Report]

The Future Cemetery Survey 2020Download

Gould, H., Allison, F., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., Gibbs, M., and Kohn, T. 2019. The Future Cemetery Workshop 2019

The Future Cemetery Workshop 2019Download

van der Nagel, E., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., Gibbs, M., Kohn, T., Bellamy, C., and Clark, N. (2017) Death and the Internet: Consumer issues for planning and managing digital legacies, 2^nd edn, Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, Sydney.

Bellamy, C., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., Nansen, B. and Kohn, T. (2013) Death and the Internet: Consumer issues for planning and managing digital legacies, Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, Sydney.

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

Gould, H., Arnold, M., Kohn, T., Nansen, B and Gibbs, M. (2021). ‘Robot death care: A study of funerary practice’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 24 (4: Special Issue on ‘Caring Media Futures’): 603-621.

Gould, H., Arnold, M., Dupleix, T., and Kohn, T. (2021). ‘Stood to rest’: reorientating necrogeographies for the 21^st century. Mortality https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2021.1878120

Nansen, B, O’Donnell, D, Arnold, M, Gibbs, M, and Kohn, T. (2019) ‘Death by Twitter’: Understanding False Death Announcements on Social Media and the Performance of Platform Cultural Capital. First Monday 24(12).

Arnold M, Nansen B, Kohn T, Gibbs M, and Gould, H. (2019) The disposition of the destitute. Parity 32(6): 22.

Gould, H., Kohn, T., & Gibbs, M. (2018) Uploading the Ancestors: Experiments with digital Buddhist altars in contemporary Japan, Death Studies 43(7): 456-465.

Van Ryn, L, Meese, J, Nansen, B, Kohn, T, Arnold, M, and Gibbs, M. (2018) Managing the consumption of death and digital media: the funeral director as market intermediary. Death Studies 43(7): 446-455.

Lambert, A, Nansen, B, and Arnold, M. (2018) Algorithmic Memorial Videos: Contextualising Automated Curation. Memory Studies 11(2): 156-171.

Nansen B., Kohn, T., Arnold M., Van Ryn L., & Gibbs, M. (2017) Social Media in the Funeral Industry: On the Digitization of Grief, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 61(1): 73-89.

Meese, J., Nansen, B., Kohn, T., Arnold, M., & Gibbs, M. (2015) Posthumous Personhood and the affordances of digital media, Mortality 20(4): 408-420.

Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Carter, M. (2015) #Funeral and Instagram: death, social media, and platform vernacular. Information, Communication & Society 18(3): 255-268.

Graham, C., Arnold, M., Kohn, T., & Gibbs, M. R. (2015) Gravesites and websites: a comparison of memorialisation. Visual Studies, 30(1): 37-53.

Meese, J., Gibbs, M., Carter, M., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., & Kohn, T. (2015) Selfies at Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platforms. International Journal of Communication, 9(14): 1818–1831.

Graham, C., Gibbs, M. and Aceti, L. (eds) (2013) Introduction. The Information Society Special Issue: Death, Afterlife, and Immortality of Bodies and Dat ,29(3): 133–202.

Gibbs M, Bellamy C, Arnold M, Nansen B and Kohn T. (2013) Digital registers and estate planning. Retirement and Estate Planning Bulletin, 16(3): 63-68.

Graham, C., Gibbs, M. and Aceti, L. (2013) Introduction to the Special Issue on the Death, Afterlife, and Immortality of Bodies and Data. The Information Society: An International Journal, 29(3): 133–141.

Gibbs, M., Mori, M., Arnold, M. & Kohn, T. (2012) Tombstones, Uncanny Monuments and Epic Quests: Memorials in World of Warcraft. Game Studies,12(1).

Book Chapters

Van Ryn, L, Nansen, B, and Gibbs, M. (2019) ‘Adapt or Die’: the funeral trade show as a site of institutional anxiety. In Kohn, T., Gibbs, M., Nansen, B, and van Ryn, L (Eds.). Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured. London: Routledge, pp. 37-51.

Hallam, E. and Kohn, T. (2019) Life in Death’s Residues, In Kohn, T., Gibbs, M., Nansen, B, and van Ryn, L (Eds.). Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured. London: Routledge, pp 1-16.

Arnold, M. (2019) Embracing and Distancing the Materiality of Death through Cremation, In Kohn, T., Gibbs, M., Nansen, B, and van Ryn, L (Eds.). Residues of Death: Disposal Refigured. London: Routledge, pp. 124-135.

Kohn, T., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., Meese, J., & Nansen, B. (2018) The Social Life of the Dead and the Leisured Life of the Living Online, in Leisure and Death: Lively Encounters with Risk, Death, and Dying, edited byKaul, A, and Skinner, J, Boulder: University of Colorado Press.

van Ryn, L., Kohn, T., Nansen, B., Arnold, M., & Gibbs, M. (2017) Researching Death Online. In L. Hjorth, H. Horst, A. Galloway, & G. Bell (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography(pp. 112-120). London: Routledge

Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., and Kohn, T. (2015) Remembering Zyzz: Distributed Memories on Distributed Networks. In A. Hajek, C. Lohmeier, & C. Pentzold (Eds.), Memory in a Mediated World: Remembrance and Reconstruction(pp. 261-280). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Nansen, B., Arnold, M., Gibbs, M., and Kohn, T. (2014) The Restless Dead in the Digital Cemetary, In Christopher Moreman and David Lewis (eds.). Praeger. Digital death: Mortality and Beyond in the Online Age.

Kohn, T., Gibbs, M., Arnold, M., and Nansen. B. (2012) ‘Facebook and the Other: Administering to and Caring for the Dead Online’, in Hage, G (ed), Responsibility, University of Melbourne Press, Parkville, Australia, pp 128–141.

Conference Papers

Gibbs, M., Carter, M. & Mori, J. (2013) Vile Rat: Spontaneous Shrines in EVE Online (2013) Foundations of Digital Games Conference (FDG’13), 15 May, Chania, Greece.

Bellamy, C, Arnold, M, Gibbs, M, Kohn, T, Nansen, B (2013) Mediating the digital hereafter: life beyond the timeline. Prato Community informatics Research Network (CIRN) Conference Oct 28–30 2013, Monash Centre, Prato Italy.

Gibbs, M,Carter, M, Arnold, M and Nansen, B (2013) Serenity Now bombs a World of Warcraft funeral: Negotiating the Morality, Reality and Taste of Online Gaming Practices. Proceedings of Internet Research 14.0: The 14th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR),23–26 October 2013, Denver, USA.

Mori, J, Gibbs, M, Arnold, M, and Nansen, B. (2012) ‘Design Considerations for After Death: Comparing the Affordances of Three Online Platforms’. Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, Swinburne University, November 26–30. ACM Press, New York, p. 395–404.

We are always looking for opportunities to connect with scholars, funerary industry members, designers and death activists. To get in touch, email deathtech-research@unimelb.edu.au or follow our Twitter account @DeathTechTeam.

Global Death Studies Centres

The DeathTech Research Team is one of several academic groups around the world who study death, dying and disposal of the dead. Some of their websites can be found at:

Death Online Research Network (DORN)
Centre for Death and Life Studies (CDALS), Durham University, UK
Centre for Death and Society (CDAS), Bath University, UK
Death & Culture Network (DaCNet), York University, UK
End of Life Studies, Glasgow University, UK
Sheffield Death Group, The University of Sheffield, UK