Call for Abstracts:

How Communication Technology Mediates Death, Dying, and Grief
Special Issue of the Western Journal of Communication
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zzqRnqTtAPTDgBXw3qVxoe3Krs2_eqUz/edit

Guest Editors:
Dr. Marco Dehnert, University of Arkansas
Dr. Nicole Costantini, Savannah College of Art and Design

Deadline for submission of extended abstracts: October 31, 2026

The Western Journal of Communication invites submissions for a special issue, “How Communication Technology Mediates Death, Dying, and Grief.”

Issues of grief, death, and dying are increasingly experienced and mediated through digital avenues, with social media and blogs serving as digital legacy spaces, digital spaces providing social support during times of loss, artificial intelligence unsettling the finality of death, and mediated communication impacting experiences of disenfranchised grief. Given that these experiences are located at the intersection of mediated, interpersonal, and family communication, among other domains, communication perspectives across varied areas are needed to better understand how communication technology mediates death, dying, and grief, and how these mediated experiences impact our social realities. The 2023-founded Death and Dying Division of the National Communication Association alongside growing emphasis on death, dying, and grief-related topics in the communication discipline illustrate the importance of communication-perspectives for understanding the experiences of death and dying in the digital age. Indeed, communication scholars are uniquely situated to address these issues given their focus on relational processes of meaning-making that have examined technologies not simply as neutral tools but rather as impactful mediators of human communicative experiences.

Death and Grief in an Age of Technology

Issues of grief and bereavement are constantly in flux and comprise one of the most profound human experiences. Similarly, communication technology is developing at a rapid pace moving through different iterations of various kinds of technologies, facilitating connection and disconnection around the topics of grief and death. For the purposes of this special issue, we understand grief broadly as an emotional and physical response to a perceived loss, which includes but is not limited to death. As a complex experience, grief is a social, community, and communicative process that is complicated by technology such as social media, artificial intelligence, and social robots. As Kneese (2023) demonstrates in her work on death glitches, because most tech platforms are driven by capitalistic profit and an individualistic understanding of identity and what it means to be human, the technical solutions these platforms offer “will always be incommensurable with the problems they are attempting to solve” (p. 4). And since, as Donna Haraway (1985) writes, the advancement of technology has created ambiguous differences between “natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines” (p. 5), we pondered the question: How will these technologies shape our understanding and performances of grief rituals as they continue to be integrated into everyday life?

Research at the intersection of death and technology has a thriving history (Beaunoyer & Guitton, 2021), with scholars examining the legacy-making capabilities on Facebook memorial pages (Marwick & Ellison, 2012), users expressing grief upon the involuntary shutdown of their AI companions (Banks, 2024), and online social support communities navigating anticipatory grief and social support (Smith et al., 2023). Digital technology allows for new types of mourning rituals, such as digital funerals (Uriu et al., 2021) and virtual cemeteries (Roberts, 2004), and affects end-of-life care and communication in many ways (Ostherr et al., 2015). Digital ghosts, avatars, and griefbots allow deceased individuals to continue their digital legacy well beyond their physical mortality (Jiménez-Alonso & Brescó de Luna, 2023), and virtual reality technology can simulate high-stakes training environments for brain death scenarios in an educational context (Junga et al., 2025). Contributors to the special issue may engage with one or more of these topics and may also propose to focus on different issues within the context of death, dying, grief, and technology.

The Special Issue

This special issue intends to bring together communication scholars across methodological, paradigmatic, and theoretical traditions to engage the primary question: How does communication technology mediate death, dying, and grief in the digital age? Submissions may engage empirical insights, critical inquiries, and analysis of narratives related to death and technology in media and culture. We welcome submissions that capture the diversity of the discipline of communication studies, from across areas, methodologies, and paradigms. Submissions should utilize a communication-centered approach.

We Invite Contributions that Engage Questions such as:

• How are grief, death, and mourning rituals mediated by technology?
• What is the role of technology in legacy-making, remembering the dead, and expressing grief?
• How do emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and social robots impact death, dying, and grief?
• How do online memorial sites and communities construct narratives of grief, support, and spirituality?
• In what ways can chatbots and other emerging technologies facilitate connections with the dead, and how might these experiences affect the living?
• How do narratives of techno-solutionism, techno-optimism, and neoliberal individualism shape contemporary discourses on death and grief?
• How might we theorize the role of technology on experiences of death, dying, and grief?
• What possibilities might emerge through performance, arts-based, and critical methodologies?
• In what ways could communication scholars contribute to more participatory, accessible, inclusive, and nonnormative ways of grieving in an age of technology?
• How do transhumanist and other political ideologies shape contemporary practices of death, dying, and grief?
• How do discourses of technological inevitability, the connected self, and the drive for hyperindividualism mediate experiences of grief and death?
• What is the role of online and offline communities in apprehending contemporary practices of death, dying, and grief?
• How can communication scholarship theorize novel experiences of grief in the context of machines such as AI companions, social robots, and more?
• How do death-aversive narratives shape practices and norms around “proper” or “healthy” grieving in an increasingly connected society?

We offer these questions as suggestions and starting points for inquiry rather than as an exhaustive list of topics. We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, performance-based, community-engaged, applied, and creative approaches that take a communication-centered approach and take up the question: How does communication technology mediate death, dying, and grief in the digital age?

Submission Information

Prospective contributors interested in submitting a full manuscript to the special issue should submit an extended abstract of 300 – 500 words describing the proposed paper, its central argument or expected findings, sources of data (if applicable), theoretical and/or methodological approach, and relationship to the special issue theme. Empirical papers should also include a brief statement explaining the status of data collection and analysis with a brief timeline detailing data collection and analysis steps.

Submissions should also include a brief biography of approximately 200 words for each author.

We especially welcome submissions from scholars across all career stages including advanced graduate students, early career scholars, independent scholars, and faculty at all career stages. We especially welcome collaborative and interdisciplinary submission, including with community-based practitioners, as long as a focus on communication is maintained throughout the paper.

Submit your Proposal through the Form:
https://forms.gle/uDNh6sGR3KM2h9c17

Extended abstracts are due October 31, 2026.

Questions about the special issue may be directed to the guest editors:

Dr. Marco Dehnert
University of Arkansas
[email protected]

Dr. Nicole Costantini
Savannah College of Art and Design
[email protected]

Authors whose abstracts are selected will be invited to submit full manuscripts to the Western Journal of Communication. All full manuscripts will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process; an invitation following abstract review does not guarantee publication.

Anticipated Timeline:
Extended abstracts due: October 31, 2026
Decisions and invitations to submit full manuscripts: by November 15, 2026
Full manuscripts due: April 15, 2027