Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the integration of social media into the human life cycle. I argue that STS scholars must consider the lifespans of social media platforms and individuals’ accumulated digital possessions

Paper long abstract:

Many scholars have discussed the ways that new technologies are incorporated into mourning and memorialization practices. The literature on social media memorials is increasingly rich (Brubaker et al. 2013; Carroll and Landry 2010; Marwick and Ellison 2012). Some researchers, like anthropologist Daniel Miller, are now examining ways that the sick and dying use social platforms to cope. On the other hand, social media platforms can track individuals even before they are born, as expecting parents post ultrasound images and document their pregnancies. After people die, their profiles and other social media pages continue on as spaces for postmortem relationships. Even if particular platforms come and go, just as individuals die, the networks of relationships that undergird them may survive.

In his public letter to his newborn daughter, Mark Zuckerberg claims that investments are "seeds," conjuring images of life, fertility, and growth over time. Silicon Valley accelerationism has given way to a temporality that takes into account sexual and social reproduction or imagined future kin members. Given these developments, what is the potential lifespan of our communicative traces versus institutions, corporations, or even states?

This paper considers the integration of social media into the human life cycle. What happens when we juxtapose the timescales of an individual human life-- from conception through illness, dying, and death, including mediated postmortem interactions with living loved ones --with the timescales of institutions and corporations? I argue that STS scholars must consider the potentially long lifespans of social media platforms and individuals' accumulated digital possessions.

Paper short abstract:

Human life ends in death, either by accident or the unfolding of time. Over the last fifty years, however, human death (and the physical act of dying) has been transformed into a kind of illness.

Paper long abstract:

Human life ends in death, either by accident or the unfolding of time. Over the last fifty years, however, human death (and the physical act of dying) has been transformed into a kind of illness. In short, death has become pathologized to such an extent that everything must be done and at all costs to prevent it from occurring. The logical conclusion to this pathologization process goes beyond the concept of an ageless body wherein physical aging is significantly slowed, while lifespan is exponentially increased to construct another kind of impossible body. The ageless body is increasingly being replaced by an emergent discourse that advocates the deathless body, or a human form-of-life in which dying is eradicated. These arguments can be located in both Transhumanist literature about the future human as well as in Palliative Care arguments against assisted suicide. While both of these groups are extremely disparate in their philosophies, one overriding premise remains true: no individual should ever just choose to die.

Yet the concept of the deathless body will only succeed if it is understood as an alternative to the postmortem pathologization of biological life, i.e., that death itself is a curable disease. The constant use of new necrotechnologies (as both machines and concepts) affecting human death brings me to the following question: What happens when human death is patented? What such a patent entails is finding a method, a concept, some combination of practical and theoretical technologies that turn death into a man-made invention.

Paper short abstract:

The dead human body has been subject to the same broad social, scientific, and technological trends that account for the medicalization of the live body. This paper draws attention to non-coincidental similarities between the burgeoning home death care movement and the natural childbirth movement.

Paper long abstract:

This article examines the women-led natural deathcare movement in the early 21st century U.S., drawing attention to the movement's non-coincidental epistemological and gender-political similarities to the natural childbirth movement. Within the deathcare industry, the dead human body has been subject to the same broad social, scientific, and technological trends that account for the medicalization of the live body. Asserting technoscientific sovereignty over the dead body, funeral professionals enact a form of postmortem necropolitics. The inconspicuousness of similarities between the medicalization of childbirth and the "funeralization" of deathcare are due to physicians and morticians' deliberate efforts to displace midwives' authority over birthing, dying, and dead bodies, and to carve out distinct professional jurisdicitions for themselves. Yet similarities between the countercultural natural childbirth and natural deathcare movements make visible a common cultural provocation. Just as "lay" or direct-entry midwives challenged the epistemic politics that empower obstetric medicine, so too self-titled "death midwives" and "home funeral guides" are now challenging the epistemological politics that divide laypersons from professional experts within U.S. deathcare culture, while literally retooling U.S. death care and seeking to empower both themselves and families who wish to care for their own dead. And as their childbirth counterparts did before them, natural deathcare advocates are now beginning to struggle with questions of gender identity, professionalization, and economic viability.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on ethnographic research which explores multiple perspectives on the use of human bodies in U.S. medical training and research with particular attention to the transformation of bodies, from living person to dead object and questionable boundary between the two.

Paper long abstract:

The use of human bodies for research and education has a long and varied history, spanning through the years to new settings and actors but remaining the same in a critical area: the reminder that tissue is fundamentally derived from a person. The way actors respond to this understanding is the focus of this paper. How do users of human bodies characterize and reflect on the humanness of the tissue they practice with? How are these characterizations demonstrated in the language, actions and value placed on human tissue? This paper is based on ethnographic research in a US major medical school and research center with faculty, academic researchers, and lab technicians. It explores multiple perspectives on the use of human bodies in U.S. medical training and research with particular attention to the transformation of bodies, from social living beings to singular dead body and questionable boundary between the two. Doing so problematizes the notion of 'necropolitics' since transformations of bodies are multifaceted and difficult to bound. Such explorations will highlight the intermixed identities of human tissue and its users by focusing on the how care, value, and ownership over dead human bodies are negotiated in biomedical spaces and test the limits of one sovereign power over such bodies.