Tamara Kohn

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Tamara Kohn is a researcher working at the intersection of death studies, digital technology, and anthropology, with a particular focus on how emerging technologies are reshaping human experiences of mortality, grief, and ritual. Her most prominent work examines the growing role of robotic and digital technologies in funerary practices, challenging long-held assumptions that death rituals are an exclusively human domain. In her widely discussed paper "Robot Death Care: A Study of Funerary Practice" (2021, 14 citations), Kohn investigates how mechanised, non-human agents are transforming care for the dead across different cultural contexts — a question that sits at the frontier of both technology studies and the anthropology of death. Complementing this, her "Cybernetic Funeral Systems" (2021, 4 citations) employs postphenomenological analysis to explore how robots mediate funeral experiences, drawing productively on Wiener's cybernetic theory. Together, these contributions position Kohn as a pioneering voice in the emerging field of robot-mediated death care, offering scholars and students a compelling framework for understanding how humanity's most intimate rituals are being quietly but profoundly transformed by technology.