Aquamation, also known as water cremation or alkaline hydrolysis, is an emerging technology of body disposition that uses water, heat, and alkaline chemicals to accelerate the breakdown of human remains. Still relatively new, it has generated attention in media though remains barely visible among academic discussions. As an alternative to traditional cremation and burial practices, aquamation raises questions linked to ethics as well as environmental sustainability, but also about how this ‘green death technology’ reshapes cultural understandings of death, aging, and mortality in relation to advancements of new digital technologies and its related data. Aquamation also prompts questions about the role of death, mortality, and aging in the context of the climate crisis, in which demographic change and population aging are increasingly included.
As digital content and imagery routinely permeate our everyday lives, in this pilot project, we seek to explore how online discourses about aquamation (images, questions, narratives, debates) are constructed in water cremation companies’ promotional materials and in publicly available online forums (e.g. Reddit and other social media platforms). Within this exploration, we ask: What conceptualizations of a “good” and “green” death emerge in online discourses within the context of aquamation technology? In answering this question, we are simultaneously critically interrogating what these data allow us to understand about societal discourses surrounding death, aging, aging bodies, end of life care, and the commercialization (and datafication) of death. To answer these questions, this project uses digital discourse analysis as a research method, contributing to the development of digital gerontology as a means by which the impact, development, and use of digital technologies and their incorporations into later life may be investigated, analysed, and understood.
Through this digital discourse analysis, we seek to uncover the practices surrounding the digital mediation of death care, focusing on how the data about aquamation (such as its environmental benefits or technical processes) are visualized and communicated. These practices not only influence how individuals perceive their death options, but they also contribute to shifting cultural narratives around aging bodies and mortality, particularly in the context of a posthuman society. By exploring how aquamation is digitally framed as, for example, an ethical, sustainable, and modern alternative to traditional burial or cremation, we are documenting a specific digital practice that contributes to new forms of meaning-making about death.
