Love After Death - FutureFest

Love does not end when someone dies. 

Love evolves and takes on new forms, 

living on through technology, 

through the earth cradling our bodies and the memories, 

which we keep in our hearts and on our devices.

At FutureFest you will be invited to explore your own legacy with experts in the field of death and bereavement. They will help you chart the myriad of choices in the future of Love After Death showing how death can be approached as a creative affirmation – of love and loss. By considering your own mortality and what you would like to happen to your body and legacy, our experts will help guide you in setting up your own Legacy Document, detailing the future of your body and extending your presence beyond death. Mortality has always been of fascination to human beings; a curiosity, an artistic endeavor but always a mystery. For generations to come design and technology will play a vivid role in these spiritual matters that speak of our very humanness. However as technology forces us to face what bodies, minds and souls mean to us, will we prefer to live on in reanimation, or continue to live through those we love?

Book your ticket for Saturday 17th & Sunday 18th FutureFest2016

2nd International Death Online Research Symposium

Call for papers

Digital technologies of communication constitute increasingly omnipresent technologies of life as well as death that structure contemporary forms of sociability, flows of affect and meaning-making.

Following the successful first Death Online Research Symposium at the University of Durham, which marked the formation of the network, the second two-day symposium to be held at Kingston University London in August 17^th-18^th 2015 will consolidate the links between existing and new members of the network and provide opportunities for the discussion of ongoing and new orientations in the interdisciplinary field of death online.

The meeting will explore how we invest death-related practices with meaning in digital convergent media, social media artifacts and networks with a focus on familiar, reconfigured and emergent types of content, contexts, new (mass media) audiences, usage patterns, and embodied forms of experience and expression.

We invite abstracts for oral presentations of recent or ongoing research addressing any of the following themes:

-       digitally mediated dying and narrative

-       digitally mediated grieving and memorialising

-       digitally mediated mourning and flows of affect

-       death online and embodied experience

-       digital afterlife, post-mortem identity and digital legacy

-       technological developments in the death care industry

In addition, we welcome expressions of interest for the screening of short films or the performance of creative pieces related to the themes of the symposium. All submissions will be peer-reviewed, and we envisage publication of selected full papers in a special issue of an academic journal in the field as well as a collection of writing from the symposium in an open-access online platform.

Important information

Submission format:  300 word abstract

Submission deadline:   March 20^th, 2015

Submission feedback:  April 20^th, 2015

All submissions and enquiries should be submitted to: deathonline2@gmail.com

marked “Death Online Symposium Submission” in the subject field. Please include full contact info (author name, university affiliation and email address) in the submission. Submissions will be anonymised by the organisers before review.

Review Committee

Dr Korina Giaxoglou, Kingston University, London

Stacey Pitsillides, University of Greenwich, London

Associate Professor Lisbeth Klastrup, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Associate Professor Stine Gotved, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Associate Professor Dorthe Refslund Christensen, University of Aarhus, Denmark