Living with the Dead or Communicating with the dead: media practices of continuing bonds among bereaved parents

TY - CONF

T1 - Living with the Dead or Communicating with the dead: media practices of continuing bonds among bereaved parents

AU - Sandvik, Kjetil

AU - Christensen, Dorthe Refslund

PY - 2016

Y1 - 2016

N2 - John Durham Peters argues that media as communicational tools not only enables dialogues with the living, but also with the dead. He argues that “every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts”; the recordings of people who have passed away fixed in photographs, sound tapes, film and in all kinds of digitized formats for registering and archiving, thus overcoming time and space is a one of the “key existential facts about modern media”: the possibilities for the living to interact with “the communicable traces of the dead” (Peters 1999:149). This argument will make a starting point for this paper analyzing bereaved parent’ communicational practices in order to create continuing bonds (Klass et.al. 1996) to their dead children. The use of media and materialities ascribed with media qualities allows us to “deal with and come to terms with death without being dead ourselves” (Christensen & Sandvik 2014a: 1). However, we would like to broaden the scope of Durham Peter’s reflections, suggesting that the ways in which parents communicate to/with the dead child are not just a matter of one-way speaking into the air but also a matter of two-way communication implying that the child has a presence despite its absence. This paper focuses on how the loss of a child initiates processes, which – beyond the recognizable period of mourning – fruitfully might be conceptualized as performing parenthood and as performing family. These processes are articulated through communicational practices in the shape of everyday parental activities such as playing with the child, reading bedtime stories, celebrating birthdays or just bearing the dead child in mind, the purpose of which are to keep the dead child as a present part of the parents’ and family’s continuing life. We argue that these practices are best understood as parents’ everyday practices relating to a child we have rather than to a child we had or a child we did not get. The child’s continuing existence and presence is inscribed in everyday life through uses of digital media, physical objects working as media – even the parents own bodies when getting a memory tattoo. Based on observation studies and qualitative contents analysis performed since 2008 on children’s graves and on online memorial sites (Christensen & Sandvik 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a) and furthermore including interviews with bereaved parents (Christensen & Sandvik forthcoming), this paper argues that bereaved parents communicational are more than anything about negotiating, (re)appropriating and performing parenthood. They may be understood as ways in which bereaved parents perform acts of loving, caring and other parental conducts in order to maintain the significance of parenthood. They do so in relation to themselves, to the dead child, to the child’s older or younger siblings and their family as such, to their peers or to their surroundings at large, and they do this through a manifold (Couldry 2012) of intertwined and interacting media.

AB - John Durham Peters argues that media as communicational tools not only enables dialogues with the living, but also with the dead. He argues that “every new medium is a machine for the production of ghosts”; the recordings of people who have passed away fixed in photographs, sound tapes, film and in all kinds of digitized formats for registering and archiving, thus overcoming time and space is a one of the “key existential facts about modern media”: the possibilities for the living to interact with “the communicable traces of the dead” (Peters 1999:149). This argument will make a starting point for this paper analyzing bereaved parent’ communicational practices in order to create continuing bonds (Klass et.al. 1996) to their dead children. The use of media and materialities ascribed with media qualities allows us to “deal with and come to terms with death without being dead ourselves” (Christensen & Sandvik 2014a: 1). However, we would like to broaden the scope of Durham Peter’s reflections, suggesting that the ways in which parents communicate to/with the dead child are not just a matter of one-way speaking into the air but also a matter of two-way communication implying that the child has a presence despite its absence. This paper focuses on how the loss of a child initiates processes, which – beyond the recognizable period of mourning – fruitfully might be conceptualized as performing parenthood and as performing family. These processes are articulated through communicational practices in the shape of everyday parental activities such as playing with the child, reading bedtime stories, celebrating birthdays or just bearing the dead child in mind, the purpose of which are to keep the dead child as a present part of the parents’ and family’s continuing life. We argue that these practices are best understood as parents’ everyday practices relating to a child we have rather than to a child we had or a child we did not get. The child’s continuing existence and presence is inscribed in everyday life through uses of digital media, physical objects working as media – even the parents own bodies when getting a memory tattoo. Based on observation studies and qualitative contents analysis performed since 2008 on children’s graves and on online memorial sites (Christensen & Sandvik 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a) and furthermore including interviews with bereaved parents (Christensen & Sandvik forthcoming), this paper argues that bereaved parents communicational are more than anything about negotiating, (re)appropriating and performing parenthood. They may be understood as ways in which bereaved parents perform acts of loving, caring and other parental conducts in order to maintain the significance of parenthood. They do so in relation to themselves, to the dead child, to the child’s older or younger siblings and their family as such, to their peers or to their surroundings at large, and they do this through a manifold (Couldry 2012) of intertwined and interacting media.

M3 - Paper

T2 - ECREA

Y2 - 9 November 2016 through 12 November 2016

ER -