February 19

2pm-4pm

Sage 4711

Please join the Communication and Media Department for a seminar titled "Suspended Lives: Cryonics and Cultural Techniques of the Undead" from Dr. Ethan Stoneman, Associate Professor and Chair of Rhetoric and Media at Hillsdale College.

This presentation examines cryonics—the deep-freezing of human bodies for potential future revival—as a technological and cultural disruption of life and death. Rather than preserving life, cryonics suspends the process of dying, creating a liminal state between existence and oblivion.
Drawing on media theory, bioethics, and cultural studies, this analysis considers cryonics as an "imaginary medium" that reconfigures mortality as a solvable problem rather than an inevitable reality. This practice raises urgent ethical and political questions: Who determines access to suspended life? What does it mean to indefinitely delay death?
By situating cryonics within broader debates on life-extension technologies and biopolitics, this discussion examines its implications for how society governs life, death, and the very definition of human existence.

Ethan Stoneman is an Associate Professor and Chair of Rhetoric and Media at Hillsdale College, where he teaches media studies and philosophy of technology. His work is broadly interdisciplinary, ranging from culture and media theory to popular culture studies, continental aesthetics, and rhetoric. He is the co-author of A Feeling of Wrongness: Pessimistic Rhetoric on the Fringes of Popular Culture (Penn State Press), Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press), and the forthcoming Cypher Culture: Conspiracy, Fandom, and the Messages That Were Not There (LSU Press, 2026).