Do-It-Yourself Commemoration of the Dead
Across Australia, people are increasingly arranging farewells for the dead themselves, or stepping outside the funeral conventions of previous generations. They choose “direct” cremation without a ceremony, find creative ways to treat and keep ashes, organize consumer-led funerals, and explore alternative forms of body disposal. These do-it-yourself practices raise questions for families, who take on new decisions and new emotional labor, and for the deathcare industry, regulators, and faith and community leaders who have traditionally shaped how the dead are commemorated.
Do-It-Yourself Commemoration of the Dead is an interdisciplinary study of this shift. Using national surveys and fieldwork with families, deathcare professionals, and community leaders, the project asks how open people are to DIY practices and how those practices emerge, how the work of commemoration is shared out and who carries it, how economic, technological, and religious forces shape planning for a death, and how new rituals may reshape commemoration traditions and the institutions around them. In its later years, participatory and speculative design workshops will invite members of the public and deathcare professionals to imagine and prototype the future of commemoration.
The project is funded by the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP250101054) and is led from the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the University of Colorado Boulder. It is the newest project from the DeathTech research team, which has studied death, technology, and society for more than a decade. Jed Brubaker joins as a partner investigator, contributing expertise in technology and mortality to the project’s design workshops and related work.
Researchers
Tamara Kohn (University of Melbourne, lead), Michael Arnold (University of Melbourne), Martin Gibbs (University of Melbourne), Bjorn Nansen (University of Melbourne), Hannah Gould (University of Melbourne), Elizabeth Hallam (University of Oxford), Jed Brubaker (University of Colorado Boulder), Georgina Robinson (University of Melbourne)
