CfP – Futures of the End of Life: Mobilities of Loss and Commemoration in the Digital Economy – act project

21-22 January Institute for Social Futures, Lancaster University, UK

This two-day symposium brings together critically and creatively engaged perspectives on how our physical and social deaths are becoming increasingly entangled within the webs of our technologically mediated lives. The aim is to address technologies not as passive tools but as configurations that emerge out of complex, socially situated design, development and appropriation processes.

Speakers include

Paul Coulton, Professor of Speculative and Game Design, Lancaster University; Selina Ellis Gray, PhD, Lancaster University; Fiorenza Gamba, Associate Professor of Sociology, Sapienza University of Rome; Wendy Moncur, Reader in Socio-Digital Interaction, Dundee University; Stacey Pitsillides, Lecturer in Design, Goldsmith’s University of London; Corina Sas, Senior Lecturer in Computing, Lancaster University; Linda Woodhead, Professor of Sociology of Religion, Lancaster University;

Call for Papers/Participation:

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We invite contributions that bring analytical, critical, practice-based and creative insights to the use, design and development of technologies entangled at the end of life. Theoretical, empirical, practical and design or art-based research and approaches are welcome.

Themes may include:

The digital economies of death, dying, commemoration and loss

Dying online or digital mediations of death

Personalization and hybridization of rituals, digital memorialization, mourning practices

Digital afterlives, agency and the social presence of the dead

Digital remains, digital legacy or peri or post mortem data

The multiple physical, informational, imaginative mobilities of death, loss and memory

The multiplying temporalities of practices, memories, experiences

Methodological considerations, e.g. ethics, privacy, value sensitive design

Please submit a 300 word abstract to p.drinkall@lancaster.ac.uk. For artworks or design proposals we also invite examples of practice, images or sketches. Please include full contact information, name, affiliation and email address in the submission. If you have any questions, please contact p.drinkall@lancaster.ac.uk.

Important information

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Submission Deadline: 14th December 2015

Notification of Acceptance: 21st December 2015

Registration by 4th January 2016

Full programme and more information: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/futures-of-the-end-of-life/

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Monika Büscher

Professor of Sociology

Director Centre for Mobilities Research

Associate Director for the Institute for Social Futures

Department of Sociology