Studies of online sociocultural practices related to death and dying constitute, more and more, a recognized field. Happily, the contributors to this area come from across a great variety of academic disciplines such as media sociology, (media) aesthetics, cultural studies, psychology, (visual) anthropology, the history of religion, philosophy, linguistics, to name a few. For this third Death Online Research Symposium, we welcome all relevant academic presentations of ongoing or recently completed or ideas for future academic research - on all kinds of death related online practices As a special focus for 2017, we  want to inspire particular focus on how we construct the contexts  for study and the methodologies we use to do our research. We welcome especially papers that are empirically, theoretically and/or methodologically focusing on :

• How do we deal with the online/offline distinction, which persists as a way of making sense of phenomena and contexts, but may inadequately describe how our research contexts are interwoven, remediations of earlier known practices, or
• How are the practices we study historically, thematically, conceptually, aesthetically, and materially related to various kinds of other (perhaps offline, perhaps not) practices?
• How is the individual and social configured?
• What are the interrelations of fiction-based and non-fiction based practices?
• How are our epistemological or methodological premises transformed through our research or vice versa, how do our premises impact our research design and practices? 

Students and researchers in the field of Death Online studies come from a wide variety of academic fields such as media sociology, (media) aesthetics, psychology, (visual) anthropology, the history of religion, cultural studies, philosophy, linguistics, to name a few. This implies that the field is inhabited by a large number of various methodologies and conceptualisations, some of which are used in classical ways while others are transformed and negotiated through the meeting with methodologies from other related fields. This ph.d. course teaches on choosing and developing methods that are adequate for the purpose they should serve, in the field of Death Online Studies. We welcome ph.d. students on Death Online related practices from any academic field.

The idea of the ph.d. course is to teach ph.d. students in the field of Death Online Research to reflect on the body of methodologies they use or want to use in their scientific work through the use of mappings and through collaborative work with collegues in the field.

The first 3 days of the course will consist of taking part in the Death Online Research Symposium through attending the keynote- and paper sessions and by giving a short paper in relation to the themes outlined for the symposium. During the conference ph.d. students will also be given an assignment to be worked out in small groups during the 3 days about the methodologies used in the various papers of the conference. It will be a mapping assigment.

The last two days of the ph.d. course will be a workshop where we will reflect on the various and very different methodologies that have been used throughout the symposium and begin to practically mapping out various methodologies and their interrelations and adequacy in the actual work of the participating ph.d. students.

• Jed Brubaker, Assistant Professor in the department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder
• Connor Graham, Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow, National University of Singapore
• Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Professor of Sociology, PhD, Director of Studies at the Master’s Program in Humanistic Palliative Care, Research Coordinator for SAGA, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Annett Markham, Professor MSO of Information Studies,  School for Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark

Keynote Abstracts