Stacey Pitsillides

• Ph.D in Design
• Associate Profressor at Northumbria University

This chapter explores immortality and transhumant rituals through the lens of science fiction. It uses ritual theory to expand on how personhood is impacted by transhumanism, transforming the nature of death rituals. In doing so, it enquires into the distinctions between life-crisis rituals and rituals of affliction in the context of immortality. C...

This chapter focuses on a body of work (2018-2021) that explores public libraries' role in engaging topics of death and dying with their communities. The Death Positive Library is an action research project and crosscountry UK collaboration between Redbridge, Kirklees and Newcastle Libraries and academics at Northumbria University. Design and human...

Donate Yourself is an Augmented Reality (AR) experience that blends sound and 3D visuals with non-linear narrative to spark debates about our organs, tissue and body data. It was created through a year-long collaboration with interactive design collective body>data>space and scientists from the Human Cell Atlas project (HCA). The HCA is a multidisc...

Donate Yourself is an Augmented Reality experience created in collaboration with interactive design collective body>data>space and scientists from the Human Cell Atlas project (HCA). It blends sound and 3D visuals with non-linear narrative to spark debates about our organs, tissue and body data. Inviting the public to explore the complex topic of d...

Since the early stages of the internet, online environments have provided new opportunities for coping with grief and interacting with the dead (Sofka, 1997; Roberts, 1999). This has led to a growing body of knowledge on Death Online (Gotved, 2014). COVID-19 has shifted these expressions from novel to the norm, particularly through the increase in...

The notion that ‘death is a taboo’ pervades private, public and academic discourses around death, dying and bereavement in contemporary Western societies. The rise of digital media within the last decades further complicates the appreciation of the stance that death is a taboo, given the increased opportunities afforded in social media environments...

This chapter is part of the 3rd edition of the Handbook of Thanatology, which will be published by ADEC (Association for Death Education and Counseling). It draws upon Kastenbaum’s classic framework of the death system (1972) and Sofka et al's (2012) extension to the thanatechnological death system to explore social representations that communicate...

The study of death online has often intersected with questions of trust, though such questions have evolved over time to not only include relations of trust between individuals and within online communities, but also issues of trust emerging through entanglements and interactions with the afterlives of memorial materials. Papers in this panel atten...

This paper explores how co-design can challenge the role of collaboration within hospice-based research. It demonstrates how an exhibition of co-designed artifacts creates new forms of discursive knowledge and ethical considerations. This research aims to reflect on a holistic collaboration with bereaved stakeholders who are intuitionally considere...

This paper explores how theories of things can create new forms of agency for the dead. It considers how meaning is constructed through the use or translation of our diverse collections and environments online. These memorials and rituals offer a plurality of narratives, experiences and esthetics, which have the potential to give a wider scope for...

This paper explores how theories of things can create new forms of agency for the dead. It considers how meaning is constructed through the use or translation of our diverse collections and environments online. These memorials and rituals offer a plurality of narratives, experiences and aesthetics, which have the potential to give a wider scope for...

Overview on the interdisciplinary perspectives on sharing loss online, Special Issue in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media on Networked Emotions.

Material Legacies brings together a collection of works that encapsulate the essence of three people’s lives. It explores how making can create meaningful encounters with the dead. These bereaved makers, from The Hospice of St Francis, invite you to experience how they have crafted their loved ones’ physical and digital heritage. The stories are to...

When we change the way we communicate, we change society. " [1] This panel aims to provide audience with a context to understand how social media technologies and the daily updating of the self is challenging our preconceptions of screen-based 'Internet' communication and influencing the development of our cultural/ personal identity(s) and sense o...

This paper considers the complex relationship between ethics and social technologies. It is particularly concerned with what it means to be intimate or share ideas of intimacy with robots and avatars. Looking to the world of theatre and situating our ethical framework within two specific plays we are able to examine new technological narratives tha...

Technology has always played a key role in holding onto some of the precious experiences we collect over our relatively short lives, in order to pass them on to the next generation. This can even be linked to communication practices which pre-date language. The connection between external communal memory and symbolic meaning may even have already e...

This chapter builds on concepts of embodiment and considers our relationship to our bodies and environment(s) through the construct of ‘posthumanism.’ By commenting on the relationship between death and the body we consider how our digital remains, both literal and affectual, may take the role of legacy continuing on and engaging, in some essence,...

This paper expresses a reflective approach to the themes and issues surrounding Sherry Turkle's new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. This can be seen as the culmination of a trilogy of books concerned with human and computer relations and its implications for identity and psychology (The Second Self...

This paper seeks to explore whether the psychogeo-graphic technique of dérive can be used to break out of the directed pattern of 'search to find' in the online space following from Lev Manovich's concept of the Poetics of Navigation [1]. An online psychogeographical dérive could be a form of digital resistance to the various ways information is be...

Within this chapter we consider the emergence of new cultures and practices surrounding Death and Identity in the digital world. This will include a range of theory-based discussions, considering how we remember and document the ‘absence’ of information and how communities and individuals deal with the virtual identities of their loved ones after d...

Heritage and Social Media explores how social media reframe our understanding and experience of heritage by opening up more participatory ways of interacting around heritage objects and concerns. Through the idea of participatory culture the book begins to explore how social media can be brought to bear on the encounter with heritage artifacts and...

Within this chapter, the authors consider the emergence of new cultures and practices surrounding death and identity in the digital world. This includes a range of theory-based discussions, considering how we remember and document the absence of information and how communities and individuals deal with the virtual identities of their loved ones aft...

This paper discusses the way we develop and relate to online identities, particularly after death. It considers how the nature of the Internet shapes the development digital narratives, drawing on the theories of Roland Barthes and Vannevar Bush. By analysing their contrasting visions of archiving, this paper seeks to question whether Bush's scient...

The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implica...

The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implica...

The full paper for this presentation can be accessed at: https://issuu.com/stelios_giama/docs/iov09_proceedings/8