In current environmental discourse, disposal does not remove and destroy waste but rather transforms it into something useful or harmful and/or re-locates it. This article shows how this operates when the 'waste' comprises human remains, specifically how innovative 'dispersal' practices are now challenging the 'disposal' discourse of nineteenth-century burial and twentieth-century cremation which contained the dead within special death spaces separated from everyday environments for living. Since the 1990s, disposal practices have been supplemented by practices with an entirely different rationale. Instead of containing the dead in safe, out of the way places, new practices disperse human remains back into environments that sustain the living, whether this be via natural burial, new cremation practices or new technologies currently being developed, namely alkaline hydrolysis and freeze-drying. Promoters of all these innovations appeal to ecological usefulness, blurring the boundary between the living and the dead, thereby positioning the dead body as a gift to the living and/or to the planet. Thus, a new ecological mentality is increasingly framing the management of all the dead -not just those interred in natural burial grounds. In the light of this, we reconsider land use policy, and question death studies' use of the term 'disposal'.

The relationship of the dead body with technology through history, from nineteenth-century embalming machines to the death-prevention technologies of today. Death and the dead body have never been more alive in the public imagination—not least because of current debates over modern medical technology that is deployed, it seems, expressly to keep human bodies from dying, blurring the boundary between alive and dead. In this book, John Troyer examines the relationship of the dead body with technology, both material and conceptual: the physical machines, political concepts, and sovereign institutions that humans use to classify, organize, repurpose, and transform the human corpse. Doing so, he asks readers to think about death, dying, and dead bodies in radically different ways. Troyer explains, for example, how technologies of the nineteenth century including embalming and photography, created our image of a dead body as quasi-atemporal, existing outside biological limits formerly enforced by decomposition. He describes the “Happy Death Movement” of the 1970s; the politics of HIV/AIDS corpse and the productive potential of the dead body; the provocations of the Body Worlds exhibits and their use of preserved dead bodies; the black market in human body parts; and the transformation of historic technologies of the human corpse into “death prevention technologies.” The consequences of total control over death and the dead body, Troyer argues, are not liberation but the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a concept and a species. In this unique work, Troyer forces us to consider the increasing overlap between politics, dying, and the dead body in both general and specifically personal terms.

In September 2006, Wisconsin police discovered Nicholas Grunke, Alexander Grunke, and Dustin Radtke digging into the grave of a recently deceased woman. Upon questioning by police, Alexander Grunke explained that the three men wanted to exhume the body for sexual intercourse. In the Wisconsin state court system, the three men were charged with attempted third-degree sexual assault and attempted theft. None of the men could be charged with attempted necrophilia, since the state of Wisconsin has no law making necrophilia illegal. What the Wisconsin case exposed was the following gap in US jurisprudence: many states have no law prohibiting necrophilia. This article on US necrophilia laws argues that human corpses and the laws that govern the use of dead bodies are uniquely positioned to cause precisely these legal discrepancies since the dead body is a quasi-subject before the law. This examination also presents an argument about one of the fundamental reasons that this gap in US law exists. Specifically, it is argued that the ambiguous juridical standing of the human corpse in necrophilia cases compounds the sexual monstrousness of the necrophiliac and of necrophilic acts. This article is the first part of a much larger study on the dead body and the law.

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In this paper, we describe collaborative processes and stakeholders involved in the period from when a person dies until they are laid to rest: the funeral, final disposition of the body, and (in some circumstances) victim identification. The rich mixture of technologies currently deployed during this brief period are categorized and critically analyzed. We then reflect on the implications of our findings, both for the design of technology that takes the end of life into account, and for the wider HCI community.