The Ghost in the Machine Learns to Speak for the Dead: AI, Rhetorical Resurrection, the the Injustice of Synthetic Voice
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CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSAL
The Ghost in the Machine Learns to Speak for the Dead:
AI, Rhetorical Resurrection, the the Injustice of Synthetic Voice
An edited Collection, edited by Shiva Hari Mainaly, PhD, University of Memphis
Abstracts due December 15, 2026
The Dead are Speaking. Who Gave Them Their Words?
In May 2025, a man killed in a road-rage shooting appeared to address his killer at a sentencing hearing in an Arizona courtroom. His face, his voice, and his words of forgiveness were all generated by AI, scripted by his family, and accepted by the judge. The moment moved some and deeply unsettled others. It also signaled what was to come. Generative AI can now produce convincing speech in the voices of the dead, from grief chatbots that let mourners “talk” with a lost parent to reconstructed testimonies of historical victims and posthumous “final statements” circulated online. A growing digital afterlife industry has turned the voices of the dead into products (Hollanek & Nowaczyk-Basi?ska, 2024; Öhman & Floridi, 2017), while deepfakes threaten the very idea of testimony as evidence (Chesney & Citron, 2019).
This collection argues that AI resurrection is not a neutral technical feat. It is a rhetorical act, with speakers, audiences, purposes, and consequences. Rhetoric has long named this move: prosopopoeia, the figure that gives voice to the absent and the dead. What is new is its scale, its realism, and the authority it borrows. Building on the concept of phantom ethos, the fabricated credibility that AI lends to synthetic speech, we ask what happens when a machine speaks as someone who can no longer consent, correct, or refuse.
These questions are not evenly distributed. Those most likely to be reanimated are often those already dispossessed of voice by histories of violence, colonialism, and erasure. Scholars have long warned about the ethics of speaking for others (Alcoff, 1991) and asked whether the subaltern can speak at all (Spivak, 1988). In particular, Saidiya Hartman (2008) has shown both the necessity and the danger of imagining lives the archive silenced. Today, such imagining can be automated, sold, and stripped of its care. When synthetic voice fills the archive's silences, it risks a new form of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007): the dead are made to testify, but not on their own terms. Since technologies encode the inequalities of their makers (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018), we must ask whose voices are resurrected, whose are distorted, and whose are simply ignored.
We invite chapters that offer a distinctly rhetorical intervention into a conversation now dominated by legal and computer science perspectives. We welcome theoretical, historical, critical, empirical, and pedagogical work, and we especially encourage contributions from scholars in the Global South, from Indigenous and minoritized communities, and from early-career researchers and graduate students.
Guiding Questions
Who holds the authority to speak for the dead, and how is that authority built, borrowed, or faked?
What does consent mean for people who cannot give it? Who should decide: families, estates, communities, platforms, or states?
How are courts, newsrooms, museums, and platforms using synthetic voice, and what counts as truth or testimony there?
Whose voices are resurrected, and whose histories of violence make them especially vulnerable to reanimation?
Can synthetic voice ever serve justice, memory, or repair? What would an ethical practice look like?
How should we teach students to read, question, and resist synthetic testimony?
Possible Topics
We are organizing the collection around five clusters. Proposals may address one or several; topics beyond this list are warmly welcome.
Part I. Theorizing Resurrected Voice
? Phantom ethos, synthetic credibility, and ethos without a body
? Prosopopoeia, apostrophe, and classical figures of speaking for the absent
? Hauntology, spectrality, and the rhetoric of the digital ghost (Derrida, 1994)
? Voice, timbre, race, and the politics of listening to machines (Eidsheim, 2019)
Part II. Synthetic Testimony in Courts, Newsrooms, and Platforms
? AI-generated victim impact statements and deepfaked evidence
? Journalists “interviewing” AI recreations of the dead
? Documentaries, advertising, and cloned voices of deceased public figures
? Platform policies, labeling, and the governance of posthumous speech
Part III. Grief, Memory, and the Digital Afterlife Industry
? Griefbots, deadbots, and the commercialization of mourning
? Consent, estates, and data rights after death
? Religious, cultural, and non-Western rituals of speaking with ancestors
? Museums, memorials, and interactive testimony projects
Part IV. Voice, Violence, and Erasure: Who Gets Reanimated?
? Resurrecting victims of colonial, racial, and state violence
? Critical fabulation versus algorithmic fabrication in the archive
? Indigenous voices, sovereignty, and data governance
? Endangered languages, Global South speakers, and linguistic justice
? Gender, disability, and the reanimation of marginalized bodies and voices
Part V. Pedagogy, Policy, and Resistance
? Teaching students to analyze synthetic media and testimony
? Technical and professional communication guidelines for synthetic voice
? Right of publicity, likeness laws, and AI policy
? Community-led refusal, counter-archives, and design justice approaches
Why Contribute?
? Shape a new field. The rhetoric of AI resurrection is still largely unwritten. Your chapter can help define its vocabulary.
? Reach across disciplines. The collection speaks to rhetoric and composition, media studies, AI ethics, law, memory studies, and technical communication.
? Join a global conversation. We are building a volume that is international, interdisciplinary, and attentive to voices too often left out of AI debates.
? Receive thoughtful editorial support. Every accepted chapter will receive developmental feedback and peer review.
Submission Guidelines
Please send the following in a single Word document or PDF:
? A chapter title and an abstract of 300–500 words, not counting references
? Three to five keywords
? A short list of key references (optional)
? A biography of up to 100 words for each author, with affiliation and email
Email submissions to shminaly@memphis.edu with the subject line “CFP: Synthetic Voice Collection – [Your Last Name].” Full chapters of 6,000–8,000 words, including references, will follow APA 7th edition style. Co-authored and interdisciplinary chapters are welcome. Please do not submit work that is published or under review elsewhere. Milestone
Date
Abstracts due
December 15, 2026
Notification of acceptance
January 31, 2027
Full chapters due
June 30, 2027
Peer review and feedback to authors
September 30, 2027
Revised Chapters due
December 15, 2027
Final manuscript to publisher
Early 2028
Shiva Mainaly