I’m pleased to announce that I’ve received support from the Deakin University Central Research Grants Scheme to pursue a new project on our online encounters with the dead throughout 2014.
As I’ve written about in both scholarly and popular forums, dead people are becoming an increasingly inescapable part of our experience of social media. This project will consider increasingly common practices of online memorialisation and commemoration, as well as other ways in which the phenomenal and practical presence of the dead is mediated through emerging online technologies. These practices will be considered in the light of a range of questions in contemporary philosophy to do with the extent of personal identity and the existential and moral status of the dead.
The grant includes some support to run an interdisciplinary workshop – more details to follow.