Alessandro Caruana

My time at Goldsmiths

I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work in a teaching environment, which will help me gain experience and enhance my CV for my future career. 

I have been very pleased with the colleagues and the people I have met during this journey; I have felt well-supported with abundant advice and guidance.

Additionally, I greatly value the intellectually stimulating and enriching relationship with my supervisor, as it has been a core positive aspect of my experience here at Goldsmiths.

Advice to future students

Put effort into what you do and take any opportunity available. Don't limit yourself. Do not forget to network and get to know people - community first.

PhD research

My research at Goldsmiths integrates psychoanalytic theory, post-phenomenology, and posthuman studies to explore emerging thanatechnologies: AI companions, digital avatars, and immersive platforms that simulate deceased individuals.

Rather than viewing these technologies purely as a contemporary response to grief interventions, my project analyses them as manifestations of a more profound cultural and psychic denial of death, reflecting evolving conceptions of identity, the body, and mortality.

To trace this, I adapt Psychogenealogy into a new framework to analyse media. Here, the focus shifts from family systems to media systems, reading technologies as genealogical artefacts entangled with human psychic development across time.

In short, by using an archaic psychoanalytic practice, this research places media artefacts on the couch—not to diagnose them in isolation but to listen to how they articulate collective anxieties about death, mourning, and the refusal of loss.