Public Lecture: "Grief Tech" with Megan Ward

Join us for a public lecture with Megan Ward (Oregon State University.) 

"The rise of grief tech, chatbots trained on the words, voices, and memories of lost loved ones, offers the alluring chance to continue a relationship beyond death. Grief tech is new, but that allure is much older, dating at least back to nineteenth-century Spiritualism. Today’s grief tech is connected to its Victorian predecessor by a shared culture of grief - one that seemed to have disappeared. While current psychological practices try to move the bereaved toward closure, Victorian mourning lingered in yearning. Bringing together Alice Stringfellow, a Victorian mother who corresponded her dead son every night, and Joshua Barbeau, a present-day aspiring actor who created a chatbot version of his girlfriend after her death, this talk explores how contemporary technologies might reveal the value (and risks) of using technology to redress the innately human problem of death."