Abstract
In this paper we analyze how bereaved parents make use of various media-strategies on online memorial sites and on children’s graves when performing processes of grief and commemoration for their stillborns and infants, and how these processes are not just linked to one particular media but take place across media. We show how the death of an infant can lead to mediation, remediation and mediatization strategies which involves both the uses and arrangement of objects on memorial pages and on children’s graves as well as uses of new social technologies, that produce, negotiate and develop social relations, belonging and coherence that are both individual and relational and that are made possible by ritually establishing online memorials and graves as heterotopic interfaces that opens certain communicational flows and accesses specific communicative spaces concerning most prominently the ongoing relations with the dead child and the (re)negotiating of parenthood.
We understand media as a function of an object reflected in human practices and embedded and structured by the different materialities they are intertwined with. We argue that the use of media and materiality online and on the graves are, in various ways, a remediation of everyday parental practices and we demonstrate how such practices and relations are structured in some basic social matrices of how to perform parenthood, both in relation to the dead child and in relation to achieving social appreciation of the missing child and the role as being parents even when the child has died.
We understand media as a function of an object reflected in human practices and embedded and structured by the different materialities they are intertwined with. We argue that the use of media and materiality online and on the graves are, in various ways, a remediation of everyday parental practices and we demonstrate how such practices and relations are structured in some basic social matrices of how to perform parenthood, both in relation to the dead child and in relation to achieving social appreciation of the missing child and the role as being parents even when the child has died.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Publikationsdato | 2015 |
| Status | Udgivet - 2015 |
| Begivenhed | 2nd Death Online Symposium - Kingston University, London, Storbritannien Varighed: 17 aug. 2015 → 18 aug. 2015 |
Konference
| Konference | 2nd Death Online Symposium |
|---|---|
| Lokation | Kingston University |
| Land/Område | Storbritannien |
| By | London |
| Periode | 17/08/2015 → 18/08/2015 |