In June 2020, the DeathTech Research Team hosted a virtual roundtable discussion with death scholars and practitioners in Australia, the UK and the US, to share how funerals have changed under the coronavirus pandemic and to discuss what this might mean for the future of death.
The COVID-19 pandemic not only represents a serious threat to human life and livelihoods, it has transformed experiences of death, grief, and memorialisation around the globe. Social distancing orders have upended cultural and religious traditions of mourning by restricting interaction with the deceased, attendance at funerals, and grave visitation at cemeteries. Simultaneously, communities have found creative responses to these restrictions through new rituals and new uses of technology. The ongoing implications of this period of disrupted death are only beginning to be understood.
The roundtable was moderated by Dr Hannah Gould, a cultural anthropologist and ARC Research Fellow with the DeathTech Research Team. Hannah conducted her doctoral fieldwork on the life and death of memorial technologies within Buddhist death care sector in Japan, and now works on research into alternative disposal technologies and the future of Australia’s cemeteries.
Participants
Mariam Ardati is a Funeral Director, Consultant and Educator based in Sydney. For the past 12 years, Mariam has dedicated her time as both a volunteer and care consultant for a number of funeral services, where she performs the funeral rites in accordance with Islamic tradition, provides spiritual and practical care to the grieving, and assists families through the coroner’s court and its processes. Mariam holds a Health Sciences degree (Health Information Management) from the University of Sydney and is a Director and Consultant at Sakina Funerals.
Stephanie Longmuir is an End of Life Celebrant, Podcaster and Consultant. She has been serving the families of Melbourne and Sydney since 2009, creating unique and meaningful services. Determined to better prepare and inform families, in 2015 Stephanie founded myendnotes.com, Australia’s first digital funeral planning service, and in 2017 she launched a podcast series, Dying to Tell, in collaboration with Melbourne radio station Joy 94.9. She is a skilled writer and speaker and has been invited by ICCFA, NFDA and AFDA to present at their annual conferences.
Dr John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website, the Future Cemetery Project and a frequent commentator for the BBC. His new book Technologies of the Human Corpse was published by The MIT Press on April 28, 2020. He grew up in the American funeral industry.
Louise Winter is a funeral director and the founder of Poetic Endings, a modern funeral company in London. Her mission is to get people to really think about the importance of funerals. She believes that a good funeral can be transformational in helping us acknowledge and accept that someone has died. She’s the co-founder of Life. Death. Whatever., a new approach to death and dying, showing how exploring our mortality really can change our lives. Her work has been featured in publications around the world. Her first book will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2021.
Our article for The Conversation, “Small funerals, online memorials and grieving from afar: the coronavirus is changing how we care for the dead”, has been translated into Japanese for The Big Issue Japan.
DeathTech team member Hannah Gould was interviewed for an article in The Canberra Times, exploring how funeral practice is adapting to COVID-19 conditions:
There are other ways in which funerals may change permanently, according to Dr Hannah Gould, an anthropologist at the University of Melbourne who studies the rituals of death around the world.
“We want to be careful and not make universal judgments,” she told The Canberra Times. People grieve and remember the dead in different ways, not just in different countries but within Australia.
There were new ways of remembering people, like drawing up Spotify play-lists of their music where the mourners each chose a favourite song associated with the deceased. The play-list could be shared and happy memories triggered.
People could meet on video chat sites to remember the dead, perhaps after watching a live-stream of the funeral.
She said that when a friend of her father’s died, his pals organised a trivia night in his memory.
Mourning takes many new forms.
“It takes a bit of creativity,” Dr Gould said, with approval.
Help us understand how COVID-19 is changing deathcare, funerals, and memorialisation worldwide by contributing to this collaborative, open research platform.
We have established a platform to share accounts of how the COVID-19 pandemic is changing deathcare, including end-of-life and mortuary care, arranging funerals, and ongoing memorialisation. This information is of interest to us as part of research into death and technology in the 21st century led by the DeathTech Research Team at The University of Melbourne. We’d like to know what you are experiencing now – e.g. how are funerals happening, how are bodies being handled, what is different?
We’re particularly interested in first-person accounts, reflections on new technologies being use and new rituals, and the emotional, professional, and social impact of these changes. You can include links to news articles, images, or videos. The researchers will also add published articles about death during COVID-19 to the map.
You can choose to upload anonymously if you wish. You can also choose to identify yourself and/or your company in the post. The location you set for the post can be as specific or general as you wish.
Privacy and Access
As an open platform, you can also view what is happening elsewhere in the world and learn from others facing similar circumstances. This means that your contribution will be public, and access is not limited to the research team.
You are free to withdraw your contribution at any time. Please contact DeathTech (deathtech-research@unimelb.edu.au) to do so.
If you are uploading images or videos, please ensure you are the one to have taken them (or can cite the original source) and have permission of those in them to upload the image/video.
The software platform being used for this project is called Padlet. The privacy policy for Padlet can be found here.
If you would like more information about the wider project, please contact the DeathTech Research Team (deathtech-research@unimelb.edu.au).
This is part of a research project that has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of Melbourne. Ethics ID number 1954540.1.
A new piece out with ABC News explores the emergence of rituals during the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing restrictions that have transformed funeral practice.
DeathTech team member Professor Tamara Kohn said of funerals under coronavirus restrictions:
We now need to produce a different kind of intimacy.
The team has a new article in The Conversation discussing the transformation of death rites in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
“The coronavirus is not only affecting the way we live, it’s also dramatically affecting the way we die.
In Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that funerals would be limited to a maximum of ten people to limit the spread of COVID-19. However, the states may have some leeway in permitting an extra one or two.
Funeral directors say they are concerned about the availability of crucial health supplies such as masks, hand sanitiser and body bags.
In Italy, people with COVID-19 reportedly “face death alone”, with palliative care services stretched to the limit, morgues inundated, funeral services suspended, and many dead unburied and uncremated.
As Australia’s coronavirus response moves into a critical period, these examples remind us that how we care for the dead must be part of our pandemic plan.”
Description: This one-day pre-conference workshop, supported by the Death Online Research Network, the DeathTech Research Network at the University of Melbourne, and the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, aims to bring together a diverse range of scholars working across the many disciplines with an interest in the intersection of death, media, and public memorialising. In keeping with the theme of the 70th annual ICA conference, the workshop aims to support openness of communication through an interdisciplinary approach, and through an inclusive format of short presentations followed by lengthy discussions around emerging and innovative research methods and issues in the field of death and media and communications research. The focus of the workshop is centred on questions of openness in the public engagement around communicating and memorialising the deceased across digital platforms, and in the mediation of public spaces by digital and mobile technologies. Across the diverse places and spaces in which the dead are remembered and memorialised, increasingly tricky questions are emerging around the norms, protocols, and practices of memorial publics, including questions of access, obligation, trust and ethics, which this workshop will explore. We welcome submissions from methodological, theoretical and empirical inquiries that examine memorial publics.
Submitting your abstract: Please submit your abstract of 300-500 words to nansenb@unimelb.edu.au
Contributors will be selected by peer-review and notified by February 1, 2020. Authors are expected to attend the preconference and present in person.
To register, participants should follow the instructions here.
Key dates
* 20 January 2020: Deadline for abstract submission
* 1 February 2020: Corresponding authors notified of decisions
This October, DeathTech Research Team member Tamara Kohn participated in a panel discussion in conjunction with the exhibition Hope Dies Last: Art at the End of Optimism.
Hope Dies Last: Art at the End of Optimism is a curated exhibition of Australian and international contemporary art presented across two sites, Gertrude Contemporary and the Margaret Lawrence Gallery at the Victorian College of the Arts. The project focuses on how artists consider the depletion of optimism, how they might envisage the end of days, and how they make sense of these tumultuous times. Exploring themes of mortality, fatalism, extinction, pain (both emotional and physical), failure and downfall, the works largely focus on the specific moment when hope evaporates for the final time. Explored with compassion, humour, sadness and resignation, Hope Dies Last confronts our individual and collective anxieties around death, reminding us of the certainty of this fate, yet recognising this conclusionary moment as one we will experience alone. Hope Dies Last will be one of the most depressing events of the year, an exhibition that will riddle us with sadness, and likely leave us more pessimistic than we have ever been before.
The panel discussion assembled a selection of esteemed speakers whose professional lives can involve considerations of death and grief. Drawing in a range of perspectives, the discussion traversed across ideas of mortality, memorialisation, the defence of life, and the pragmatics of death. Hopefully not as bleak as it sounds, On Optimism and Death offered a unique platform to consider the prospect of death and its impacts – personally and collectively – through the lenses of anthropology, the legal system, the arts and the funerary industry.
On Optimism and Death was chaired by Mark Feary, Artistic Director, Gertrude Contemporary
Participating Speakers:
Eric Jong, exhibiting artist In the exhibition Hope Dies Last, Eric Jong presents the work Death and Paperwork(2017), from the project Too Poor To Die focussing on destitute funerals for persons lacking the financial resources to pay for their own funerals. For this project, the artist worked closely with Bereavement Assistance, a not for profit organisation in Melbourne.
Professor Tamara Kohn, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Melbourne Tamara Kohn is a Professor of Anthropology with extensive fieldwork experience in the Scottish Hebrides, the eastern hills of Nepal, and more recently Japan. She has held research and teaching positions in England (Oxford and Durham) and Australia (the University of Melbourne). Her research focuses on identity and experience, the study of trans-cultural communities of practice (from caring practices to sports and other embodied arts), mobility (migration, intermarriage, leisure/travel), death studies, methods and ethics, and the anthropology of the senses.
Audrey Lake, Funeral Consultant Audrey Lake has spent 13 years working with death in diverse settings, beginning her career as a counsellor in palliative care. With an interest in forensics and the criminal justice process she moved onto roles with the Initial Investigations Office at the Coroners Court of Victoria and the Victims Support Unit at Victoria Police working with families through the early stages of unexpected or traumatic bereavement. Subsequently she transitioned into working as a mortician at the Victorian Institute of Forensic, a coronial undertaker and a funeral consultant for a not for profit funeral company.
Michael O’Connell SC, Judge, County Court of Victoria Michael O’Connell was appointed to the Victorian Bar in 1990 and as Senior Counsel in 2008. During his 30-year legal career, he has been involved in several homicide, terrorism, white collar crime, sexual offences and occupational health and safety cases. The barrister served as part of the team of Australian lawyers representing accused members of the Bali Nine, including Myuran Sukumaran.
DeathTech team member Mike Arnold talked to Patricia Karvelas for the ABC Radio program RN Drive on the increasingly diverse options for dealing with human remains.
On March 6th, 2018, DeathTech Research Network members Tamara Kohn and Bjorn Nansen participated in a conversation on “Our Digital Presence After Death” for the Life Matters program on Radio National.
