Special Issue "DIDE–Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife"

Dear Colleagues,

Throughout history, death has typically been presented alongside and orchestrated by religion and/or other ideological belief systems and societal institutions (Ariès 1977; Davies 2011). The Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife (DiDe) research consortium builds on the premise that in contemporary digital society, death is largely and increasingly experienced through and managed by affordances of digital communication and the related cultural, social, and institutional practices and conventions (Sumiala 2021; Sisto 2020; Stokes 2021). The present circumstance affects death as a social and cultural phenomenon in multiple ways (Jacobsen 2021). It transforms ideas, beliefs, and conceptions of death in society, alters relationships between the living and the dead, influences the range and character of bereavement practices, reconditions values and morals associated with human death, and reconfigures institutional structures that manage and control death in society (Sumiala 2021; Coeckelbergh 2020; Han 2020).

The DiDe consortium (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/digital-death-transforming-history-rituals-and-afterlife) has committed itself to investigating the topic of digital death by approaching human death as a multifaceted object of accelerated cultural and social transformation in digital society. In DiDe, digital death is defined as a concept that is more than just death and death-related practices perceived, experienced, and performed in a digital context. DiDe specifies digital death as a manifold phenomenon articulated, experienced, and performed in interaction with digital communication and culture. This refers to a dialectical approach in which the digital is seen to shape perceptions and experiences of death in society and culture, but also being shaped by it.

With this Special Issue of Social Sciences, the DiDe group aims to shape a joint foundation for the study of digital death (1) by exploring the interrelations of death and the digital and reflecting on the various formations these interrelations might have for the present day society and (2) by reflecting on the challenges of studying digital death as an interdisciplinary research field. he ambition of this Special Issue is to become an authoritative contribution to the field and to make an essential reading for students and fellow researchers in this rising research area.

The Special Issue will include texts that are theoretical, empirical, and/or reflective. The authors have been invited and picked by the editors.

Publication is planned for 1 January 2024.

Dr. Johanna Sumiala
Dr. Dorthe Refslund Christensen
Guest Editors

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• digital death
• grief
• afterlife
• immortality
• beliefs
• practices
• history
• ritual
• ritualizations
• transformation
• interdisciplinarity