How Might We Reimagine the Future of Death Care?

Lea-Ann McNeill
So, we are waiting for people yet to continue to join, but we might make a start. It is now after 10:00 a.m. and people can of course, continue to jump in in that time. What I will do is I guess I’ll just introduce myself. My name is Lea-Ann McNeill. I’m the general manager for OpusXenta. If you don’t know what OpusXenta does. Basically, we provide digital solutions for the death care industry. So solutions to help you map your cemeteries and manage Cemetery, crematoria and funeral director records. So we really do work across the whole industry. Our in-conversation series is really something that we’ve been doing now for a number of years. Probably started much like a lot of webinars did as a result of COVID and we have continued to do those. And realistically, it’s just about, I guess, sharing information, sharing information, sharing conversations, having conversations around the notions of death and death care.

And we do these about every couple of months. So once you’re on our mailing list, we’ll be able to keep you informed of when these sorts of things are happening. So today we have with us Dr. Hannah Gould. Hannah, I’m going to let you probably introduce yourself a little bit more, but I will say that Hannah is a sociocultural anthropologist. You can explain to everybody exactly what that is. She is a research fellow out of the University of Melbourne but probably really importantly for us here today, she’s a member of the DeathTech research team and again, I’m going to let her talk a lot more today about what that team does. That’s the aim of today’s session, if you like, but also just a few little housekeeping things. If you’ve never attended one of our sessions previously. We do record the session. We do a recording, we make a transcript available because obviously work gets in the way and sometimes people can’t always make the webinar so we like to make that information available to people later who can’t attend. So we will be recording the session. Once again along the bottom of your Zoom screen, you’ll see a couple of different features.

What we normally ask is Hannah is going to do a bit of a presentation for us initially as part of the session, but if it prompts any thoughts or if you have any questions, you’ll see a Q and A feature button along the bottom of your screen. Please pop any questions that you have into that Q and A feature and I’ll be able to moderate some of that conversation at the end of Hannah’s presentation. So if you’re having any technical issues, pop those into the chat. But if you have any questions or thoughts for Hannah or anybody, really as part of today’s conversation, pop those into the Q and A feature. So probably without any further Ado, I will just jump out of this screen and this one. All right. So a couple of us are going to turn off our video so you can’t see our heads while Hannah presents. And Hannah, I’d like to welcome you to our In Conversation series and hand over to you.

Hannah Gould
Wow. Thank you so much for your introduction. I’m just going to get all the text set up. Here we go. All right. Hi, everyone. Yeah, as I said, thank you for the introduction it’s really great to be here this morning and be able to chat to all of you, both those who are present, perhaps those who are listening to the recording later on. As was noted, my name is Hannah Gould, and I work at the University of Melbourne on the DeathTech research team, all of which I will shortly explain. And I’m really excited to be here to chat to a primary industry or community or practitioner audience, as it were. As an academic, we obviously spend a lot of our time talking to other scholars, but what I’m really passionate about and what I want to talk to you about today is about how researchers and industry and community groups can work better together to kind of start solving some of these big problems or big challenges that we see facing death care. So this talk is a little bit, I suppose, about that, about what we can do to work together, what research into death actually looks like. So what does the academic landscape of people studying death and dying looks like? Who are they? What do they study? How do they study it, and then some kind of conversations about how researchers and industry can work together, how you might be able to engage researchers in your work, in your Practise, and maybe hopefully also how we can better talk to you. And I’ll finish up today by talking about the Redesigning Deathcare Conference, which is a major conference we’re running here in Melbourne in October, and which I’d like to extend an invitation to all of you to come and attend. So, as noted, I am a cultural anthropologist, and so cultural anthropology is an area of social sciences which is particularly interested in how different cultures and communities view and experience the world. So what we’re really interested in is kind of the human universals, what brings us all together, but then also what defines us, what distinguishes us. So death is a great example of this. It’s possibly the ultimate example, right? Everyone dies, but how we die, how we hold rituals, how we hold funerals, that occurs in really different ways. And so cultural anthropologists are interested in, I suppose, uncovering those different types of experience of the world and trying to compare them to our own situation so that we can learn from that cross-cultural exchange.

So as a cultural anthropologist employed at Melbourne Uni, I focus my research on death and dying, on material culture or technology, as well as on religion. So I’m interested in these kind of different areas, which at first might seem quite disparate, but I think, as our hosts have known, all come together in really interesting ways, whether that be new technologies for streaming funerals online or whether that be new technologies, new methods for handling disposing of human bodies, and then also how those all kind of fit into our religious or cultural background. So for my PhD, I spent the majority of my time actually working in the Japanese funeral industry. So for those of you who have seen the wonderful film Departures (Okuribito), I studied with that group of wonderful nokanshi (funeral directors) with those dresses. And I’ve been interested particularly in how Japanese death ritual is modernising and transforming in response to many of the same pressures that we in Australia here face in regards to things like demographic change, ageing, population, people being less religious, all of those kind of things that are emerging in Australian death care. I spent my time looking in Japan and how people are responding to those. Subsequently have done a lot of work in Australia, particularly around the disposal of human remains, and looking at some of those new emerging alternatives and how they might be applied to Australia.

And specifically, over the last year, have been looking at the experience of death care workers during COVID-19, culminating in this report here on the right and essential service, which gathers together a lot of survey and interview and experiential data about what it was like for people to work in the sector. So, yeah, I mean, summarised my research is pretty much the stuff of death and the death of stuff. I’m interested in what it means for people to dispose of things, get rid of things and the kind of objects that they use to do it, which is a great area and perhaps an area that you didn’t realise that people had a whole career around. I’m very lucky to be able to work on these research projects and do this work. So my work at the University of Melbourne is very much part of a team, at the moment I work with something called the DeathTech Research Team, which is an interdisciplinary group of scholars who focus on death technology and social change and so you can see all their names and disciplines here. We’re based at the University of Melbourne and Oxford University, and scholars in anthropology and media studies, in science and technology studies, in engineering, computer interaction, all really interested in and focused on how new technologies are transforming the death and dying space.

So, this team have been working together for about gosh over ten years now and bringing together lots of different research focuses to kind of work in this really interesting space through a number of grants. So the major research projects that the team have been working on are these three. So firstly, the first project was on digital commemoration, so specifically responding to, I suppose, what was five or ten years ago, some really new and radical ideas around commemoration on Facebook and Twitter, and how those new social media spaces could be used to commemorate the dead, but also potentially the dangers or the potential threats or I suppose, difficulties with doing that. Our second project, beyond burial and disposal, sorry, beyond burial and cremation that should be focused particularly on scalable alternatives to conventional burial and cremation, specifically looking at their representation so how they’re being sold to consumers, so how things like alkaline hydrolysis, resomation, acquamation, or whatever you want to call it, and technologies like recompose, human composting, as well as things like natural burial and even some of the ones that we know don’t work and don’t have any evidence. So, things like fungi suits and burial pods and all of these things that we know are more kind of fantasy than fact, how they were being proposed to Australian audiences or audiences globally, and were they suitable to be adopted into Australia, but also, why is it that people were really attracted to them?

So even if they’re kind of a fantasy in a way, what was it about that fantasy that attracted people to these disposal options? And what can that tell us about how people are approaching or changing their approach to death through things like secularism or concern for the environment, for example? And then the third research project, which is a collaboration that the DeathTech team have been running with the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust, very much championed by the late, great Deb Ganderton at the Trust is focused on the future cemetery and assessing kind of the potential of new technologies to transform or enhance the Cemetery, responding to all those concerns that we have about limited space, about tenure issues in Australian cemeteries, tenure and yield issues, but also new kind of desires for more technologically enhanced death and dying. So these are the three projects that the team has been working on over the last ten years and there’s a lot more, I suppose, that we’re going to hopefully do in this space. There’s always more questions to ask and more questions to more research projects to be involved in. But I wanted to take this opportunity, talking to a primarily, what I say, industry or practitioner audience, to kind of give a bit of a 101 into death studies as an academic discipline, because I don’t think there’s a lot of awareness outside of the University about actually what is this thing that is research into death.
So first of all, well, who studies death? Unsurprisingly there’s a lot of different people in a lot of different parts of the University. So obviously we have palliative medicine scholars who are interested in things, in palliative care interventions, in nursing, for example. We also have a huge area of law scholarship that’s interested in heritage and Wills and probate, for example, a whole area of taphonomy forensic scientists who work very closely with police and SAS recovery forces to look at decomposition in different contexts. We have religious studies scholars who are studying funeral rights, ideas of the afterlife, transforming ideas of ritual, for example. So in short, death is relevant to all disciplines, which should come as no surprise to all of you, because we know that death is relevant to all aspects of our lives. In some way this is great because it means that everyone in the University is interested in death and dying and there should be lots of scholarship into it, but it actually can be quite counterproductive and that’s because death is so spread throughout all of these different disciplines and different areas of the University. In some ways, there’s no central spot for people to come together and become death scholars and research deat and then hopefully put that research out to the broader public.

So we tend to find a lot of disciplines kind of talking past each other, scholars talking past each other, all forming silos. So I’ll show you a little bit about what those look like. There is a thing called death studies it should be said death studies is an interesting area that emerged kind of in the UK in the 1980s, particularly in humanities fields like sociology, but that doesn’t necessarily capture everyone and bring everyone together. So what we have instead is what I’ve said about these kind of silos, and interestingly enough, you might be able to recognise them here as silos within industry as well. So they tend to split about what aspects of death and dying, what point in the timeline you’re studying and therefore who gets to study it. So we have a lot of people in palliative care interested in the end of life, and maybe that’s an area for medicine and aged care, aged care facilities. We have some people interested in death, in disposal, Memorial, in legacy, but kind of never the Twain shall meet. Right? So you rarely get these spaces where people who are interested in memorialisation, perhaps who are working in cemeteries, very rarely or not often enough, do they get to interface with people working on aged care and palliative medicine when we know that death is experienced as a continuum and that the experience of people who are bereaved or who are dying themselves uses a continuum.

Unfortunately, we have these kind of silos that occur both within scholarship and I think to a lesser, perhaps greater extent within industry, although perhaps you can enlighten me on that. So there is a lot of people studying death, even if they’re not always brought together. And we’re really trying to bring people together in new ways and they’re also studying a lot of huge range of topics. Okay. So in Australia, we have a few major centres. So the DeathTech Research Team here in Melbourne, the Research Centre for Palliative Care, Death and Dying at Flinders University in Adelaide. But alternatively, we don’t necessarily have larger death centres in the same way that somewhere like the UK might, for example. But there are a huge range of topics that are being studied. So major areas of focus in Australia are things like palliative care and end of life, areas of grief and bereavement, which is hugely studied within psychology and also digital technologies so there’s quite a lot of research being done into digital technologies in Australia. What we are missing, but we still have major gaps on is really basic things. So things like the contemporary funeral, direct cremation, diversity and technology, we really don’t necessarily have a good scholarly understanding of what a contemporary Australian funeral looks like and why.

And often when I talk to industry people, they love to hear research and they ask me a question and sometimes I feel really quite sad that I have to say, unfortunately, no one has done that work yet. And I’d love to tell you about why it is that we have PowerPoints and music at Australian funerals, and that’s like a really big point of Australian funerals, but not elsewhere. So there are a few interesting projects that are going on, I should say, in these areas. So we do have some current projects that are emerging around LGBTI funerals in Australia, around the legal rights of the dead body, of the corpse across state boundaries. So some of these questions please hold on we’re trying to get answers and hopefully if you engage with researchers now that you can help shape those research questions as well. How is it studied? How do researchers do this work? Well, a lot of it is through empirical data collection, through surveys, through interviews. A lot of scholars also engage in something called ethnography or participant observation. You might not be aware of this if you are outside of the Academy, but one of the major tools of anthropologists in particular is to actually go into an organisation or a culture and live and experience what it is.

So I worked in a Japanese funeral home for several months and tried to understand what it means to be a funeral director in Japan. And I did that by actually working alongside people for a couple of months. Obviously, you’re never going to gain the same insight that someone who’s been working as a celebrant for 50 years is going to have, but you take those experiences and you try and bring them home and through reading and comparison, try and understand a little bit about that experience. There’s also more participatory methods in terms of holding workshops with industry. Some images here of us. We hold industry workshops quite regularly with people in Melbourne to get them engaged and in a design process so bringing the kind of issues, big issues together with the team and trying to solve these problems together. So you’ll see here on the left this photo, as well is from the Japanese Index, which is a Japanese funeral industry convention. So my team in particular spends quite a lot of time at funeral conventions around the world, whether that be in Australia or Asia or USA, and talking to people about the latest technologies and how they’re emerging. So if you see us, say Hi. But as I said, this kind of individual research approach, lots of little different projects going on at lots of different universities, has been kind of a struggle to find a space to bring people together and talk. So a few years ago, we founded the Australian Death Study Society, and that’s in a real attempt to bring scholarship together and find a place to discuss. So my contention here, I suppose, is that Australian death care faces major challenges, is probably could be written to say that all death care systems around the world face major challenges. Obviously, COVID has brought this to the fore, but I know we can all agree that there are much more long term, slower moving challenges around demography, secularisation, the environment, space, all these kinds of issues. And then I think that scholars, industry and community and government can better work together to solve them. So one of my really big goals is to help scholars and industry and practitioners kind of come together a little bit better. And you might be asking, well how on Earth do we do that? So I have some ideas, some suggestions here for industry about, okay, I’d love to be more involved in research. What does that actually look like? And these kind of really range in levels of participation.

So the first one is just to participate in research. So responding to calls for interviews and surveys and finding a way to circulate those results within your company. So Australian Death Studies Society often hosts kind of like calls for interviews with funeral directors, calls for interviews with celebrants. We’d love to do a survey of funeral directors. We’d love to talk to you guys, understand what’s going on and choosing to participate in those, but then also working with the researcher to find a way to take those results from that survey and actually circulate them within the industry. Because I can tell you now, academics love the idea that their research actually goes somewhere and people care about it. We’re never going to be afraid to share results, to share outcomes of research, to share insights. Almost all research in Australia is publicly funded, so we don’t have any kind of competition clauses, et cetera. We want to get it out there. We want it to have an impact. The second is to participate in education so we have a number of subjects now that are running about death and dying in Australia. I designed a subject just this year for first year medical students about death and dying and about what it means to be, I suppose, a doctor interfacing with that end of life care, trying to get them to think about the D word and say the D word a little bit sooner into their medical education. And so we have lots of opportunities for you to come in as a guest speaker, for example. So if it is a subject that you know is about death and dying, contacting the subject coordinator via email and saying, hey, I’m a funeral director, I’m a celebrant. I’d love to come in and talk to your students. I’d love for them to come for an excursion and come and see the funeral home, because I think death education is vastly important, obviously, for all students. But it’s particularly important for people who are going to be our doctors and nurses of the future, for example. And then there’s, I suppose, more from an industry kind of corporate standpoint I suppose there’s more engaged ways that you can directly sponsor research. So direct sponsorship, which is commissioning or engaging academics as consultants to undertake research projects.

Academics are really good at research. That’s their job. That’s what they do. They’re also really cheap compared to research consultants, and they want to create knowledge to contribute to the public good. We want answers, we’ve got lots and lots of questions we’d love to find the answer to. We don’t necessarily have the funding to do it. So partnering with academics directly to say, hey, I’d love to do a project about pet cremation in Australia. And what do consumers want from the death of their pets? Do they want to cremate them? Do they want to be buried with them? What kind of ceremonies, what services do they want? That’s a great research project that everyone would love to do in Australia, but we don’t necessarily have the resources to do at the moment. So that’s one way you can engage. And then finally, I suppose the most extensive collaboration is what we’ve been working with the Greater Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust, which is a Linkage grant. So Linkage grants are run through the Australian Research Council. This is talking in Australia specifically, but I know that Canada and the UK have similar schemes where you collaborate with the University as a research partner, and the government matches the funds such that you can create a long term four year project, for example, to undertake a major piece of research into an area of death study scholarship that excites you, that interests you, that aligns with your industry goals, but also then contributes to this public knowledge of death and dying. And ultimately, I suppose, to the goal of ensuring a better death end of life experience to people, which is hopefully what we’re all working towards.

We do, of course, have a problem on the other end, though, which is I think that a lot of death studies research goes on and we talk to ourselves and we don’t necessarily talk as well to industry and to practitioners and people in the community. So I have a question, I suppose, to some of you in the audience, and maybe this is a conversation that we continue, which is how can researchers better engage with industry and community? So how do we make our research more accessible? I think a lot of researchers are guilty of only writing academic papers and not publishing when they should be, I very strongly believe, should be writing works for popular press, for industry, giving talks, participating in seminars, trying to feed back that research and make it useful to the people, particularly if they’ve kind of taken a lot of data and surveys and help people participate in these research projects. So I think this is something that we also need to work on and get our house in order, but I have one solution, hopefully. Here we go and that is the Redesigning Deathcare Conference. So this is a conference that we are championing and that I am actually helping run. It’s occurring in October 27 to 29th in Melbourne of this year. And the goal of the Redesigning Death Care Conference is very much to bridge this gap, right, to bridge the divide between research and practise at the end of life. And so all of the contributions, all of the panels that we have are a mixture of academics and industry and community groups and government, and we’re inviting people who want to have those challenging conversations. So we’re likely to have funeral directors as well as an academic as well as a community member as well as a government representative on the same panel trying to come together to solve these kind of problems, and to think about how we can actually make sure that we’re working together in ways that maybe we don’t usually or haven’t previously done around death and dying. So there’s a huge amount of different ways that you could be involved in this conference, whether it’s just attending and listening all to the wonderful talks, asking questions and networking, or if you’d like to be involved in terms of giving a paper and contributing in some way and sitting on a panel. And perhaps we can talk a little bit more about those in the Q and A, which is to say that it’s a really exciting time to be a death studies researcher. There’s lots of energy there’s, lots of people who are interested now in studying topics of death and dying. But I think we’ve got a bit of work to do to ensure that the results of that research are communicated to industry and communities, and also that we are being useful and accessible to people outside of the University so that our research can make a real impact. And as I said, that we can try and build a better system, solve these kind of problems of death care together, and we’re not talking past each other. Right. I will stop there. That will be my little intro, and hopefully we can have some good conversations and questions following on. Thanks.

Lea-Ann McNeill
That’s great. Thank you, Hannah. I’ll just remind everybody that if you have any questions, just pop them into the Q and A feature there and we can facilitate that conversation. But I actually wanted to pick up with you, Hannah, because prior to the webinar, obviously, I jumped onto the DeathTech Research team’s website and had a little bit of a play around. So there’s some great stuff there. And I think it picks up really well on your comments in regards to trying to get that research out there and get information out there. There’s a number of different, I guess, blogs and posts and things like that that people can already start to have a look at and one of them that probably sparked my interest, I suppose, and we have a number of celebrants, I know, in the webinar this morning. And I think it’s one there where you spoke to Radio National Life Matters team around who were funerals for and this notion of funeral planning. We had Lisa Herbert on. Yeah. You would be aware of Lisa’s book, The Bottom Drawer Book. I really love her book, just because it has that nice cartoony, makes it kind of user friendly book, but about funeral planning and I think there’s some really interesting questions or something posed here about you can plan your funeral in a book like what Lisa has, but what if that almost totally contradicts what those who are left want in terms of a funeral? And I guess I’d be really interested in your thoughts around that notion of who was a funeral for.

Hannah Gould
Yeah, it was a fascinating conversation because it was great I was on Radio National and there was another academic from Sweden, actually, and we were all supposed to talk for lengthy kind of academic, blah, blah, blah. But Radio National got so many callers in on the talkback radio line with these extraordinary stories of them planning their own funeral or having Dad’s funeral in the backyard with a barbeque, et cetera, that we actually didn’t talk very long, which is great because I got to hear all of the wonderful stories. Yeah. It is an interesting thing. And I think people it is a really good and I think demonstrative point about how lack of even basic knowledge about how death works, I suppose, can really impact people and impact families. And I suppose that both scholarship and industry, we haven’t really gotten through to the majority of the population yet around these questions. So kind of there was a Victorian law Commission a few years ago and pointed out that funeral instructions don’t have any legal weight. You can say cremate me, bury me, I want a rock funeral, I don’t want a funeral. But ultimately you can’t enforce them right? And so it is about the conversations you have with your next of kin. And it’s about having an understanding, very difficult thing to do for already in a death phobic community. But it’s also a very challenging thing to try and engage the public about in that conversation and that basic knowledge in terms of who funerals are for in Australia. I think one of the saddest things I think about research is that we don’t have a good book about the contemporary Australian funeral. Hope it’s on my to do, I’ll try and get there. But I think what’s fascinating about Australian funerals and that distinguishes them from UK, Canadian, US funerals, even, is the extent to which from a long time ago, they’ve been about a celebration of the life of the deceased, and they’ve been positive and they’ve been secular and they’ve had all these interesting things about music and live performance and PowerPoint Slideshows that actually have led the way internationally. We’ve been funeral innovators in Australia in a way that’s not acknowledged because we haven’t done this research as well. So I think Australian funerals are very much for the family. I think that’s an interesting thing to think about. But you do always get like it’s always typically the older Aussie bloke, dude is the classic who’s like just put me in a hole somewhere. No fuss, no fuss, which is funny and we all laugh, but actually as a scholar, it’s so significant because I think that person really goes against what a lot of other scholarship in the US and the UK is writing about how people always care about funerals. People always care about the body. Not in Australia. Right? Because we’ve sometimes got these blokes.

Lea-Ann McNeill
This ocker approach to it.

Hannah Gould
Ocker approach, death pragmatism or something.

Lea-Ann McNeill
And I guess the question is that real, or is it this Ocker approach? Because I know there’s also schools of thoughts linking the importance of a funeral and the ritual associated with that in terms of how people grieve and ongoing mental health. That’s pretty complex, right?

Hannah Gould
Super complex. I don’t want to paddle off questions, but this is actually one of the major areas that I think I would be really interested to engage celebrants and funeral directors a little bit more about this, because I think there’s a tension because obviously, funeral directors and celebrants are in the business of ritual and providing ritual and selling ritual and facilitating families through grief. But on the other hand, it makes sense to us. I think that you need a funeral to grieve. Well, that funerals help with grief. But we’ve also had this recent study from scholarship on death studies which shows actually we can’t find any connection between the elaborateness of the funeral and experiences of grief. It’s more complicated. It doesn’t mean there’s no connection, but as far as scholarship can tell thus far, looking at all psychological reports and I can put the thing in the chat in a moment, what it says is there is no necessary connection between the elaborateness of the funeral or even your satisfaction with it and long term experiences with grief. That’s not to say that there’s no connection.

Lea-Ann McNeill
But there are lots of other factors.

Hannah Gould
Yeah.

Lea-Ann McNeill
It’s more complex than that.

Hannah Gould
Exactly. And so what are those factors? All right let’s try and work out what it is, because if we want to help people grieve better, then we need to work out what it is about the funeral, what it is about that experience that actually is the thing that helps with grief, because if we can work out that, then we can facilitate that better. That’s a great example of like, wow, scholarship has discovered this thing. I think industry practitioners have this understanding. Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to work together and actually research what it is?

Lea-Ann McNeill
And I guess that digital media is very much the same now. And we actually have a question somebody is saying, does digital media really have a place, I suppose, across death care and maybe where and how. And I guess digital is everywhere, right? So it stands to reason that it’s going to sit within the death care industry as well.

Hannah Gould
Yeah. And I think the great 2020 whatever it is experiment, funeral streaming and live streaming, for example, people ask me all the time, so is that going to transform funerals forevermore? And it’s quite difficult to tell because I don’t think there will be many people who feel from what I’ve been able to research, that streaming is a good replacement for being in person. Right. I don’t think we’re ever going to say, oh, why would I go to a funeral? I can just stream, for example. And I think we’re always aware of it when it was introduced. But it doesn’t mean I think, as you say, it doesn’t mean that the digital is not, therefore part of how we commemorate. Right. Whether that be Facebook posts and commemorative social media things, whether it be the PowerPoint streaming music at the funeral, whether it be kind of all the behind the scenes of digital media. One of the early papers we did as a team was hashtag funeral. Right. How people were posting selfies from Instagram about their funeral experience, for example.

Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah.

Hannah Gould
Massive public outrage about it, but we actually talk to it and young people, and it was just them saying, well, I don’t know how to process all this grief. So I’m going to do what I kind of always do, which is to engage on social media. So I think just because the Zoom funeral is perhaps not our future doesn’t mean that there isn’t all these interesting ways in which digital media will creep into or become part of the funeral ceremony.

Lea-Ann McNeill
You mentioned, I think, really early on when you kind of flagged digital media as an area of research, that there were potential dangers or risks associated with it. Can you speak about that a little bit?

Hannah Gould
Yeah. So I suppose, weirdly enough, the origins of the DeathTech team were a phenomenon known as well, it’s now known, I suppose, in the contemporary Zoom bombing. But we originally were responding to this phenomenon of Facebook’s Memorial pages being taken over and vandalised, which was a really big concern, I think, when Facebook first really first started doing kind of Memorial pages and commemorations, the security has got a lot better because tech companies have had to respond to death. And so they’ve found ways of shutting it down, but it’s not to say that it’s entirely different from Offline memorialisation, but as we have more extensive digital technologies that are able, I suppose, to recreate or enliven or animate the spirit of the dead, whether that be through the simplest form of your mom logging onto the dead son’s Facebook and continuing to post on his behalf, or it be someone creating a holographic representation of the deceased and feeding in all the data to it, and they can talk back and participate in the world. Two extremes, but there are always going to be controversies about how suitable, how ethical, how moral that is.

Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah.

Hannah Gould
Now I think there’s similarly controversies about gravestones and what you put on a grave. Right. Family conflicts, you shouldn’t put that and they shouldn’t put that and how dare you build this? So they’re not totally dissimilar from Offline memorialisation politics because the technology allows us to do new things it also, I suppose, means that it has ethical and moral implications in new ways. It kind of extends that boundary. It’s like kind of like a train and we’re only just putting the tracks down. Right. We haven’t really worked out what is appropriate, what are the social norms as that technology barrels forward?

Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Hannah. And I’ll share with the audience here, as I shared with Hannah, I lost my husband, well, only two weeks ago after a very brief cancer diagnosis. And I must say I’m already thinking that people posting a lot of things, both on the day of his passing and then on the day of the funeral, which I’ve got to say was fantastic. At the time, I thought it was really great, but I’m already thinking about how that’s going to look for me over the years, because Facebook has this thing where it says, look back on your memories. And I’m thinking, in twelve months time, am I going to want to look back on that memory? What is that going to be like? So you’re right. I think there’s these new experiences that we just haven’t had long enough with them yet to know the value of them or whether they are a danger or a positive thing. We just don’t know yet. Right.

Hannah Gould
Yeah. And ourselves are kind of known unknowns. We don’t also necessarily know how to predict them and then prepare ourselves for them because of the way that the algorithm kind of can just pop things up into your feed and remember this five years ago.

Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah, that’s right.

Hannah Gould
But I think offline we were able to think, okay, I won’t walk through the Cemetery today. Or maybe it’s today. I’m not feeling great. Maybe today is not the day to go to my partners, my husband’s, my friends, my father’s favourite bookstore. I suppose it’s the known unknowns of trying to predict how we will react and look sometimes I think we’re inevitably going to get it wrong. Yeah. Sometimes we’ll get it right and it will be wonderful. Right. And occasionally popping up to someone in your feed that you’ve missed or haven’t thought about for a while can be really comforting and lovely, but it is difficult to predict.

Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah. In terms of other, I guess, new things that we’re seeing. You talked about these fantasy disposal options, and I remember reading things about mushroom composting and different things like that. I don’t know what you’re seeing in Australia, but from my background, even working in cemeteries, green burials here haven’t taken off in the same way that people thought they were. So people have got this notion of these great environmental methods of disposal. But when it actually comes to the crunch, doesn’t seem to be the decision that they’re making yet.

Hannah Gould
Yes, I agree. I think there’s two things. I think when we think about the environment or ecological death and ecological desires at the end of life, it’s important to distinguish between kind of the science of what actually would make a death more green and ecological often, which are kind of quite boring things like better irrigation or what species of plants you’re going to plant around a Cemetery, which is really important work that a lot of cemeteries are doing about sustainability, and I know a lot of cemeteries want to go carbon neutral, for example, and all that kind of hard work and then what I see emerging is actually kind of part of a popular spirituality around death, which is in a way and not to kind of give away the punchline, but I think for many people, the idea of returning to the Earth or becoming a tree is replacing an idea of the afterlife or going to heaven. Right.

Lea-Ann McNeill
Okay.

Hannah Gould
And for secular Australians who perhaps aren’t very religious or maybe my parents are Christian, but I don’t really want to have Christian funeral and I don’t know what’s going on. But yes, I like the idea of going back to the Earth. All right. I like the idea of like, oh, one day I’ll be a tree and grand kids can come and visit me. That type of thing. We don’t have to think about it as religious if those kind of terms make people uncomfortable. I think they can. But I think the idea or the image of eco death is very attractive for a lot of people as a comforting idea that helps them understand their life and their death and the value of their body and their life. Right. I’m going to give back to the Earth in some way. And so the kind of solutions that appeal to them, whether they be fungi or pods. I know so many celebrants and funeral directors, every time there’s a story with those pods or whatever, they get lots and lots of phone calls and you have to…

Lea-Ann McNeill
Yeah.

Hannah Gould
No, they’re not possible. And why would you want to do that? Those appeal in a romantic kind of way of being environmentally friendly, even if they’re not practical. We know they’re not practical. So I think there’s a gap between practical ecological solutions, and what we need to understand is that people are looking for meaning in their death, and one way I think defining it is through this idea of eco death, whether an environmentality.

Lea-Ann McNeill
I guess we’re getting very close to time. You do have the conference coming up. Somebody did ask a question about the fact that we know you extended submissions through till the end of March. Obviously, we’re in April now. If people still were interested in maybe trying to submit something, is that still possible?

Hannah Gould
Yeah. So what we’re going to do is we will be releasing the programme, I suppose, skeleton. So all of the different sessions that are going on, who’s running and what’s the title of them? Some of those sessions will still be open to participation, so some of them are full. Some people have gone out and found eight people to be on their panel, and that’s great. But other ones, we’re still looking for people to contribute. So that will be on the website, hopefully just trying to think probably by the end of next week and you can put your hand up to be in one of those sessions. I’d also say even if you’re not kind of on the programme to speak or talk. There’s going to be lots of opportunities for you to come and participate in workshops. We’re going to have a speed networking session between practitioners and academics. There’s going to be a lot of artistic projects running that are really participatory and lots of spaces for you to talk and engage and network, even if you’re not giving a 20 minutes talk, etc. So please do attend. It’s going to be fabulous. We’ve got so many things planned.

Hannah Gould
Look, it is the first conference in the world that’s trying to do this, and hopefully it’s going to be really landmark. I can’t give away any of the names of the keynote speakers we’ve got they’re really good coming from overseas, I want to say. But I can’t. Please do keep an eye out. So registrations will be open June 1 for attendance. But if you’d like to try and fill any of those speaker gaps, they should be open probably in the next week or two.

Lea-Ann McNeill
That’s fantastic. And I guess I want to reiterate actually everything that Hannah has said. It is great to see Australia leading the way in a conference of this type. If you are interested, once again, it’s from the 27th to the 29 October. It is in Melbourne. I’m going and so is some of my team will be there. I would also encourage you if you’re interested in going to the conference, but you’re just interested in the area in general. The DeathTech team at https://deathtech.research.unimelb.edu.au/ is a great website. I just honestly just Google DeathTech Research and it’ll take you straight to the website and there’s some great stuff already there if you are interested in this area.

Hannah Gould
Yeah, sorry. I’ll just put another link in the chat, which is the link to the Australian Death Study Society. So that also has a Death scholars database. So if you’re interested in a particular area and you’re looking for a scholar or an academic who’s working that area, we have a list for you and you can email them directly.

Lea-Ann McNeill
That’s fabulous. And as you say, I think that’s what’s really important is you’ve got this great group of scholars. You’ve got this great group of people working right across the industry. We all need to start to talk and work out how we do this better together. Right?

Hannah Gould
100%.

Lea-Ann McNeill
All right. If we’ve got no other final questions for Hannah, I would like to thank her for her time today, as I know personally now. I mean, I’ve worked in the industry for a number of years, but it’s really not until it happens to you personally that you really understand the significance of the industry and what it is that it does. I also really want to thank all of the participants for taking some time today and joining us. As I mentioned, we have recorded the session so if you want to let other people know in your network of it, the session will be available on the OpusXenta website in the next few days along with the transcript so please let us know if you’re interested in that but also register your interest with us and join us in these sorts of in conversation series moving forward. I know that we’ve also got some good ones coming up. So on behalf of OpusXenta, thank you Hannah. Thank you everybody for coming. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.

Hannah Gould
Thank you everyone.