CDALS attends DORS#6 – Death Futures

CDALS attends DORS#6 – Death Futures 

The Death Online Research Symposium – DORS#6: Death Futures – took place over three days in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, hosted at Northumbria University’s School of Design. The conference brought together a range of scholars from around the world, both in person and online, who are all broadly working on projects concerning death in relation to the digital age.

CDALS was represented by Douglas Davies and Georgina Robinson, both of whom delivered insightful papers. Davies focused on the livestreaming of funerals at UK crematoria during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Robinson questioned how digital mediums may aid the uptake of new funerary innovations, with particular focus on alkaline hydrolysis in the United Kingdom.

DORS#6 was an exciting conference for CDALS as one of the first events we have participated in as part of our involvement in the CHANSE-funded Digital Death (DiDe) project. The conference brought together many of the academics working on the DiDe project in person – including Dorthe Refslund Christensenn (University of Aarhus, Denmark), Mórna O’Connor (University of Aarhus, Denmark), Anu A Harju (University of Helskini, Finland), and our own Douglas Davies and Georgina Robinson, who has recently been appointed as Durham’s Postdoctoral Research Associate for the DiDe project. Our Consortium lead, Johanna Sumiala (University of Helsinki, Finland) joined us virtually, as did Adela Topelan (University of Bucharest, Romania). You can read more about the academics in the DiDe Consortium here.

The topics discussed throughout DORS#6 were diverse and exciting, including three distinctive keynote addresses. To conclude proceedings on the first day of DORS#6, Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) delivered a keynote entitled ‘Digital Death and the Rise of Screenlife Cinema’. At the half-way point of the conference, Professor Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Australia) delivered a keynote entitled ‘The Mourning After: embodied affective witnessing and mobile media mourning in human and more-than-human worlds’. Finally, the eagerly anticipated Professor Carla Sofka (Siena College, USA) closed the conference proceedings with a keynote entitled ‘The Evolution of Thanatechnology: Never in My Wildest Dreams…’

The conference was thoroughly enjoyed by all – CDALS would like to thank the conference organisers and we look forward to DORS#7!