The DeathTech Research Team is a group of anthropologists, social scientists, and human-computer interaction specialists based at the University of Melbourne in Australia. They are working to understand the intersection of death, technology, and society in the 21st century.

In this video, Tamara Kohn talks about the DeathTech research projects she works on through the University of Melbourne in Australia. She is a Professor of Anthropology at the School of Social and Political Sciences.

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 elaborations on 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 world views 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.

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 memorialization.

Around the world, many cemeteries have begun adopting new technologies to improve their visitors’ experiences, reduce their facilities’ environmental footprint, and extend the personalization 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.

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 their previous work on digital memorialization and the mediation of death online.

This work 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.

Learn more at DeathTech.org.