Paula Kiel

Research topic

Title: Digital afterlives and the transcendence industry: contemporary social constructions of death in Western societies

Supervisors: Professor Shani Orgad and Dr Dlyan Mulvin

Paula's research project explores the role of digital media in the contemporary social construction of death, focusing on recently emerging platforms of digital legacy that offer to facilitate post-mortem digital interactions and online presence, enabling deceased individuals to continue to be actively present in online communicational events. Such practices are potentially challenging the modes, times and places of presence of death and the dead in everyday life in contemporary western societies. In her project Paula seeks to characterise these practices and understand their meaning by investigating three sites: the specific platforms as multimodal cultural artefacts, practices of technological design and practices of technology use.

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• View Paula's TED-x conference talk

Awards

Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) 2016 Best Student Paper Award, for The emerging practices of the collective afterlife: multimodal analysis of websites for post-mortem digital interaction.

Expertise

sociology of death, multimodal analysis, practice theory, social shaping of technology, digital and online communication