Sustaining cryonics: framing environmental discourse on this practice

Ever since Ettinger’s first speculations on cryonics (1972), this practice has been defined as the freezing, immediately upon death, of people who have suffered from rare or incurable diseases. The purpose of the process is to store the body and prevent decomposition until a cure for the cause of death can be found (Gordon 1975: 132). Studies have underlined the risk of environmental damage due to Radical Life Extension procedures, which include cryonics, but they have proven to be only speculative, and no certain data can be extracted from them (Hainz 2014: 228-229). The aim of this study is to assess the framing of sustainability discourse related to cryonics. To do so, this study will be based on the comparative analysis of two corpora, one of newspaper articles retrieved via Factiva, and the other comprising selected webpages from cryonics providers’ websites that have to do with environmental and sustainability issues (e.g., the products used for freezing the bodies and the impact they may have on the environment, or the impact this practice may have on the population, were it to be successful). Within this research landscape, framing refers to selecting aspects of a perceived reality and making them “more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation” (Entman 1993: 52). To better understand the role of frames and to gain insights on the composition of the texts and most recurrent figures, both corpora will be analysed by means of Corpus Linguistics (McEnery 2019). This research is expected to return deeper insights on the framing of environmental discourse related to the sustainability of cryonics. While overwhelming positivity in the discourse proposed by providers is expected to be found, it will be interesting to compare it to the possibly contrasting discourse brought forward by newspaper articles and see where the connection and/or discrepancies lay in the framing of this process in the two areas of interest. References Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58. Ettinger, R. C. (1962). The prospect of immortality. New York: Doubleday. Gordon, W. T. (1975). The Vocabulary of Cryonics. American Speech, 50(1/2), 132-135. Hainz, T. (2014). Radical Life Extension: Should It Be an Issue for Ecology? Gaia, 23(3), 226-230. McEnery, T. (2019). Corpus linguistics. Edinburgh University Press.