Project: Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife
| Acronym | DiDe (Reference Number: CHANSE-472) |
| Duration | 01/09/2022 - 01/01/2025 |
| Project Topic | Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife (DiDe) consortium investigates the topic of digital death by approaching human death as an object of accelerated cultural and social transformation in digital society. DiDe provides a unique scholarly contribution by producing theoretically advanced, empirically nuanced, and contextually sensitive new knowledge on social and cultural transformation of death as digital in the European societies examined. In DiDe, digital death is defined as a concept that is more than just death performed in a digital context. It is a practice articulated and performed in interaction with digital communication and culture. The digital is seen to shape death practices, but also being shaped by it. DiDe has five specific objectives which are formulated as the following research questions. 1) How has digital death, as an idea and a concept, emerged and developed when examined through the past and present of modern European societies? 2) How are everyday contemporary death practices related to online and offline mourning and commemoration in society? 3) How does digital death transform social relationships among the living, but also between the living and the departed? 4) How does digitalisation of death shape worldviews and related ideas of future postmortal communication in the context of afterlife and immortality? 5) What kinds of ethical dilemmas associated with the value of human life and death emerge due to digitalisation of death in present-day society? DiDe’s methodological focus is qualitative. It applies commensurate methodological and data gathering measures, which allows meaningful analysis, discussion and interpretation of findings in the diverse studies, allowing the use of qualitatively informed comparative approach in the consortium. This interdisciplinary consortium includes scholars in media and communication studies, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history and theology. |
| Network | CHANSE |
| Call | Transformations: Social and Cultural Dynamics in the Digital Age |
Project partner
| Number | Name | Role | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | University of Helsinki | Coordinator | Finland |
| 3 | Durham University | Partner | United Kingdom |
| 4 | Bucharest University | Partner | Romania |
| 5 | School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark | Partner | Denmark |
| 6 | Center for Arts, Design and Social Research (CAD+SR), Boston, USA | Observer | United States |
| 7 | TIUKU: Public Information Cultural Factory | Observer | Finland |
| 8 | University of Western Australia | Observer | Australia |
| 9 | Haddash Academic College, Jerusalem, Departments of Photographic Communication, Politics of Communication, Behavioral Sciences | Observer | Israel |
| 10 | The Finnish National Theatre | Observer | Finland |
| 11 | Concordia University | Observer | Canada |