Engaging this year’s presidential theme of “The Future,” this panel interrogates how death, dying, and the afterlife function as sites for "futuring"—critical spaces where we assess and build the horizons for what is yet to be. Topics include the evolution of memorialization in digital landscapes; "hauntologies" and the role of counter-memory in challenging dominant narratives; the aesthetics of mourning; tensions between eschatology and technoscientific futurisms (e.g., transhumanism, cryonics, and AI afterlives); and the capacity of ancient and new traditions to imagine futures beyond despair.
The invention of new mass media visual technologies – including photography, video, and social media – has raised significant questions regarding the ethics of “viewing the dead.” Should we watch the videos of the death of George Floyd or protesters shot by ICE in Minneapolis? Should photographs of children killed in school shootings appear in newspapers? In this paper I address these urgent questions by turning to the way photography has been used to depict a narrative of Jewish death as tragic and violent. These images of death contrast with Judaism’s general reluctance to visually engage with corpses, whether in the traditions of Jewish art or in death care rituals. By developing a more positive aesthetic of Jewish death – one that depicts care, solidarity, and community - we can begin to imagine a visual culture of death as caring in the face of violence, as creating solidarity in response to oppression.
Popular cultural narratives such as film and television programs serve as a terrain where competing meanings are assembled and contested, symbolically resolving tensions that may not be fully articulated elsewhere. Utilizing critical/cultural studies approaches to religious studies and popular cultural texts, in this paper we consider the ways that contemporary tensions around life/death and the human/machine interface are represented in the film Mickey 17 and in several television episodes of Black Mirror, Upload, and Severance, each of which depicts characters who leverage technologies as a means of overriding, denying, or deferring death. Building on the work of Donna Haraway and Achille Mbembe, we introduce the concept of Anthropocene lament to capture the emotional sense of mourning these narratives evoke as they speak to the tensions that emerge in a technoscientific system that allows colonizers to leverage technology to deny or defer the natural processes of death.
This paper theorizes hospicing Zionism as an ethical, political, and memorial practice for a Jewish futurity in the face of planetary collapse. Rather than treating Zionism as the inevitable future of Jewish life, it reads Zionism as a dying structure that continues to reproduce violence through dominant regimes of memory. The paper argues that counter-memory is the central practice through which Zionism can be hospiced, since haunting names the ethical demand issued by histories that cannot be successfully buried. These histories include Palestinian death and dispossession as well as the suppressed inheritances of non-Ashkenazi, non-Zionist, diasporic, queer, disabled, and racialized Jewish communities. Integrating historical and theological analysis, ritual interventions by diasporist Jewish communities, and personal narrative, the paper imagines Jewish futurity beyond sovereignty, exceptionalism, and trauma, toward accountability, relationality, and repair.
This paper examines communal forms of AI griefbots. While most scholarship treats AI griefbots as private technologies of mourning, it focuses on cases in which reconstructed voices address gathered audiences in public, institutional, or ritualized settings. Comparing these practices with ancient pseudepigraphal writings, the paper argues that both involve communities generating meaningful postmortem speech from traces left behind and receiving that speech as significant after death. Nineteenth-century Spiritualism provides a more recent analogue, making visible the social expectations and interpretive habits that surround communal postmortem voice. Read together, these cases illuminate a recurring religious logic in which communities authorize speech for the dead as guidance, consolation, witness, or public address. By situating communal AI grief practices within this longer history, the paper expands current discussion beyond private bereavement and opens the way for more careful evaluation of the promises and dangers of emerging digital afterlives.