School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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Item"Adapt or Die": The funeral trade show as a site of institutional anxiety(Routledge, 2019-06-11)Funeral directors shot themselves in the foot over cremation, and cemeteries got splattered with the blood.
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ItemAutomating Digital Afterlives(Oxford University Press, 2021-08-26)The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
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ItemResearching Death Online(Routledge, 2017)Death now knocks in a digital age. When the time is nigh, whether from natural causes at a ripe age, or from accidents or illness when young, the word goes out through a range of technologies and then various communities gather offline and online. Digital ethnography in this “death” sphere has been growing in form and possibility over the past two decades as various platforms are designed and become occupied with the desires of the living and dying. Online funerals and commemorative activities are now often arranged alongside the perhaps more somber rites of burial or cremation (Boellstorff 2008, 128). Services such as LivesOn promise that we shall be able to “tweet” beyond the grave; members of online communities encounter each other on commemorative online sites where they grieve for a shared friend but never meet each other “in person”; and it is predicted that soon there will be more Facebook profiles of the dead than of the living.
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Item"Backs" to Nature: Musing on Tourist Selfies(Waveland Press, 2018-01-29)This volume, Tourists and Tourism, is organized for use in the classroom. My newly solicited chapter critically analyses how ideas of the tourist gaze upon nature is challenged in the age of the selfie.
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ItemOn the Shifting Ethics and Contexts of Knowledge Production(Berghahn Books, 2017-06)
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ItemThe Ethics of University Ethics Committees: risk management and the research imagination(Berghahn Books, 2017)
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ItemBeing in Sound: Reflections on Recording while Practicing Aikido and Shakuhachi(Berghahn Books, 2017-02-28)This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, ...
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ItemFacebook and the Other: Administering to and Caring for the Dead Online(Melbourne University Press, 2012)
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ItemCrafting Selves on Death Row(Ashgate, 2012)
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ItemRemembering Zyzz - Distributed Memories on Distributed Networks(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)In times when public and private spheres are mediated more than ever, this volume looks at the way personal and collective memories are employed to revise and reconstruct old and new forms of individual and social life.