When is Death Official? Sociotechnical Entanglements with Human Mortality

CDHI is pleased to welcome our first Visiting Speaker of 2023–2024: Dr. Jacqueline Wernimont! This will be an IN PERSON event on the St. George campus of the University of Toronto. Please register at this link.

Professor Wernimont’s talk is titled “When is Death Official? Sociotechnical Entanglements with Human Mortality”

As in life, death in the modern world is everywhere entangled with social and technical infrastructures. What it means for a death to be officially registered with government differs from what it means within a close community. This talk will explore how gender and sexuality in particular feature in paperwork of mortality and why those particular features matter and for whom.

Professor Wernimont is the Distinguished Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and an Associate Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth. She specializes in long histories of digital media, histories of quantification, and technologies of commemoration. She is an active part of the FemTechNet collective. Jacque’s book, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2018) traces long histories (21st century to 16th century) of particular technologies like wearable devices, body measurements, and body counts. With Elizabeth Losh, she also co-edited Bodies of Information: Feminist Debates in Digital Humanities, which is part of the University of Minnesota Debates in Digital Humanities series. Jacque cut her digital humanities teeth at the Brown University Women Writers Project, where she began as an encoder and later worked as the project manager and textbase editor.

Please note, this event will take place IN PERSON in room SS2098 (the History dept. boardroom, 100 St. George Street) at the University of Toronto, St. George Campus. It is both free and open to everyone. Pre-registration is required.