#AcaWriMo accountability post 14 (Nov 21). Shifting away from death this week to read the edited collection /Alternative #Historiographies of the #DigitalHumanities/ edited by Dorothy Kim and Adeline Koh, available as an #OpenAccess e-book from #Punctum Books.

Kim's introduction "Media Histories, #Media Archaeologies, and the Politics and Genealogies of the Digital Humanities" does the hard work of laying out succinctly the problematic history and historiographies the collection's essays are resisting, reframing, and speaking back to. She begins with the way that the early engineers and developers of Silicon Valley viewed the digital world they were building as a "version of the American West" steeped in the values of settler colonialism (17), supporting this point with an analysis of the use of master/slave language for disks and programs into the present (18).

This focus on power and violence continues as Kim moves on to discuss the dependence of digital development on its military usefulness, highlighting systems of digital mapping whose development has been funded thanks to military support (19-20) and which continues to be intertwined with settler-colonial ways of being (20).

Kim characterizes the volume as "engag[ing] with three main historical methodologies--media archaeology, the discussion of historiography in relation to "big data" and big humanities/digital humanities; and the discussion of silence and history making" (21). This is accomplished through six sections: Presents, Histories, Praxis, Methods, Indigenous Futures, and Black Futurities (24-29). The contributions throughout these sections, Kim asserts, share a focus on dynamics of power (23-24) and call on scholars in the field to "re-set discussions of the #DH and its attending straight, white origin myths" (24).

#academodon #histodons #litodons

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/alternative-historiographies-of-the-digital-humanities/

#AcaWriMo post accountability post 13 (Nov. 17-18)
In the 24.3 and 24.4 isssues of the journal /Mortality/, Marin Robert and Laura Tradii published a two part article "Do We Deny #Death? I. A Genealogy of #DeathDenial" and "Do We Deny Death? II. Critiques of the Death-Denial Thesis."

The first part offers a helpful overview of history and sociology scholarship on death denial in Western culture, highlighting the rise of this theory in the early to mid C20th with thinkers like Freud. Notably, they argue that the death-denial theory requires a kind of nostalgia for past relationships with death, a contrast between the present death industry as impersonalizing and commodifying and the past paradigm of death at home as intimate and personal.

At the end of Part I and throughout Part II, Robert and Tradii argue that death and the dead are actually very present in contemporary popular culture. While I can agree with this, I continue to think that US culture is very bad at coping with the deaths and the dead that we encounter. I would agree that we collectively are not denying death, but we are also not collectively responding to it. There is a sort of individualism in the lack of communal mourning and grief rituals beyond the immediate funeral and burial services.

#academodon #thanatology #AmWriting

#AcaWriMo accountability post 12 (16 Nov.).

In her monograph /Virtual #Afterlives: Grieving the Death in the C21st/, Candi K. Cann explores the present uses of #VirtualSpaces for #mourning and #grief in the contemporary US, with some comparative attention to other world cultures. The brief argument Cann presents in her preface suggests "that [in the US] memorialization has increased so much because death itself is disappearing" (para. 3).

Her introduction contextualizes these present practices as the culmination of several historo-cultural processes in the US over the last 150 years. The Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War are key drivers. The first created the conditions of specialization of labor and population density in cities that contributed to the rise of the funeral home and mortuary industries (para. 2). The latter created the conditions for embalming to become a standard practice for all bodies (para. 3).

Cann then goes on to offer an extended discussion of #BereavementLeave policies, highlighting that the US has no federal laws or mandates that govern what companies offer to their employees. The federal government's #bereavement policies for their own employees are among the most generous in the US, but they have not trickled out into the private sector.

These policies influence both for whom we are able to grieve by enumerating particular relationships and degrees of kinship and for how long by limiting the time off (with or without pay) and requiring evidence in the form of a death certificate or obituary.

[side note]: One thing Cann doesn't mention is that it takes time to get a death certificate. In the case of my late husband, it was about a week after the funeral, so about 10 days after the death. Had anyone needed it for bereavement leave, it would not have been available to them.

Back to Cann--These limitations on the practices of #mourning and the processing of grief have a created a situation in which US society does not have a common framework for mourning, in contrast to the mid C19th when mourning clothes, armbands, ribbons identified the grieving and people withdrew from social life and work for an expected period of time.

Published in 2014, this book does not, of course, address our current pandemic or geopolitical situations, but I think it highlights the lack of memorialization we're seeing of the COVID dead, the climate change dead, and the armed conflict dead.

#academodon #DeathStudies #Thanatology
https://academic.oup.com/kentucky-scholarship-online/book/20771

#AcaWriMo accountability post 11 (15 Nov.).

The edited collection /Deathscapes/ offers a variety of Western perspectives on the locations of #death, #grief, and #mourning in #SpaceTime.

In her foreword, Lily Kong highlights the role of death as a connector or a bridge. It reflects the culture values we espouse and the ones “that are neither ordinarily recognized or explicit” (para. 1).

Kong also mentions the way that death is “anchored in space and place” (para. 2), a theme which Avril Maddrell and James D. siddaway will pick up in their introduction, adding the anchoring element of time (para. 3).

These basic ideas have some implications for my #death and #Disney article, but I think the rest of the volume is likely tangential to what I’m thinking about.

https://www.routledge.com/Deathscapes-Spaces-for-Death-Dying-Mourning-and-Remembrance/Maddrell-Sidaway/p/book/9781138269484

#AcaWriMo accountability post 10 (14 Nov).

I realized today that I’d gotten through my reading stack, and I started following up on all the stars I’d put in the bibliographies. And I just have to say that I miss the generous #library access of #Purdue and the #WRLC. My current library situation is much less awesome.

#AcaWriMo accountability post 9 (Nov. 11)

In "Religious and Nonreligious Spirituality in Relation to Death Acceptance or Rejection" (/Death Studies/ 2011, 35), Victor G. Cirelli asks important questions, but has a flawed framework.

The central research question is how a person's relationship to #spirituality correlates with their attitude about #death. Citing relevant literature, Cirelli synthesizes a definition of spirituality that highlights the ideas of "peak emotional experience" of connection with a "person, object or idea" outside the self (126).

Where Cirelli loses me is in his section on "Spirituality Derived From Religious Belief" (126-129). This section presents itself as being ecumenical or interfaith, but is really very #Christonormative without acknowledging its #Christonormativity.

The results and discussion sections, in which Cirelli discusses the interviews with his research participants are interesting to read. Cirelli finds that the participants whom he coded as having religious spirituality were more likely to favor death acceptance over the prolonging of life while those he coded as having non-religious spirituality were more likely to reject death in favor of prolonging life (142). He does note that these were initial pilot studies with a small number of participants, so not generalizable, but definitely indicative of this being a fruitful area of inquiry.

[This part is all me: In addition to a schema that is not Christonormative, I would be particularly interested in the relationship between a person's degree of spirituality and their attitudes about death. What I've seen anecdotally in my religious circle of acquaintance is that observant but not overly devout people (in other words, people for whom spirituality is not a central part of their life) tend to have beliefs about death and the afterlife that are more shaped by non-religious spirituality than by the tenets of the religion.]

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07481187.2011.535383

#AcaWriMo accountability post 8 (Nov. 10).
In "Communicating Death with Humor: Humor Types and Functions in Death Over Dinner Conversations," Andrea Lampert South, Jessica Elton, and Alison M. Lietzenmayer analyze a corpus of conversations about #death, #grief and end of life issues among friends and family members using the #DeathOverDinner framework.

They find that in their same, humor gets used in variety of ways to cohere the community at the table (855, 858) and to manage the emotions of the participants. Notably, they discuss that "The use of humor allowed participants to help themselves or others save face [...], to have reprieve from serious conversation topics [...], to help participants indicate support for others [...], to help participants minimize or cope with uncomfortable situations [...], and to communicate honesty, especially when the honesty was uncomfortable (gallows humor)" (857-8).

They note that much of the existing research into death and humor has looked at humor in deathbed or grief after death situations (851-2), but this research suggests that humor also has a role to play in the kind of #thantocultural change that Kinney was talking about in the article I read yesterday. The Death Over Dinner model encourages people to talk to friends and family about death and end of life issues, and these researchers suggest that more study about the role that humor can play here would be fruitful.

This article appeared in /Death Studies/ (2020) 851-860
https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2020.1716883

#AcaWriMo accountability post 7, for Nov. 9. Kaitlyn Kinnney's article "Engaging with Discomfort: #Thanatological Social Movements and Public Death Education" in the 2022.9 special issue of the *Journal of #Folklore in #Education* on #Death, Loss, & Remembrance Across Cultures is packed with information and new-to-me vocabulary!

Widowhood confirmed for me the impression that people in the US are generally really bad at dealing with death. Kinney lays this at the feet of the #funeral industry, in partnership with #hospitals, and cites several sources who delve more deeply into this history since the early C20th (80).

The result, Kinney asserts, is a #deathscape that is full of "silences and displacements" (80). In response to this unsatisfying deathscape, recent years have seen the rise of #thanatological social movements that seek to bring death more openly into everyday, mainstream culture in the US.

Kinney differentiates her use of #thantological from #thanatocultural, noting that the latter term encompasses a descriptive reflection of the "cultures of death and dying shaped by [their] deathscape" whereas the former is both more scientific (or study-related) and activist (in terms of working for thanatocultural change) (80).

The four major orgs Kinney identifies in the thanatological social movement are: Death with Dignity (end-of-life decisions), Death Café (frank and open conversations), #DeathPositivity (calls for industry reform), and Collective for Radical Death Studies (scholars, professionals, and activists) (81-82).

Kinney also notes the particular importance of digital spaces to changing attitudes toward death and grief in the C21st through the work of the organizations she names and others (81). This is a point that made me think of the Facebook groups/pages (One Fit Widow, An Inch of Grey, Widows Wear Stilettos etc.) and self-help websites (Modern Loss) that position themselves as speaking boldly and publicly about a taboo subject.

Ultimately, all of these entities are pushing back against the taboos that have developed in the last 150 years in the US. This pushback is incredibly important as we live through a #pandemic and the escalating #climate crisis that both continue to kill indiscriminately, especially as we figure out how to #grieve collectively but safely.

Kinney's article should be widely read and shared.

https://jfepublications.org/article/engaging-with-discomfort/

#AcaWriMo accountability post 6, for Nov. 8 (I don't work on Sundays, and Monday was very Monday). This is about Ofelia Esparza's article "Día de los #Muertos Altars: Bridges to #Remembrance, Healing and #Community" and related classroom resources in the 2022.9 special issue of the *Journal of #Folklore in #Education* on #Death, Loss, & Remembrance Across Cultures.

Esparza is a recognized artist and educator, with a long and well-respected record of creating and teaching people #Ofrendas the altars for honoring a family or community's dead during the Día de los Muertos holiday. Although this holiday has become coincident with the Christian observation of All Saints and All Souls days at the beginning of November [like the Celtic traditions that have been bastardized by the commodification of Halloween] this mesoamerican holiday predates the arrival of Christianity with the Spanish colonizers (62).

Esparza describes present day observances of Día de los Muertos as a kind of syncretic practice that represents a "meld of Christian and Indigenous religious beliefs" (63). Notably, she also writes that this holiday was largely unknown in the "California-based Chicano community" until a Catholic sister and two artists introduced it in 1973 (61).

This (re)introduction in the US in 1973 was an effort at community building, which Esparza emphasized throughout the piece. This community, of course, includes the dead. The ofrenda becomes a bridge (63), a kind of contact zone, where the living and the dead can meet. This idea of the bridge is depicted in the animated film /Coco/, on which Esparza and one of her daughters "served as cultural advisors" (65). Esparza writes about her own experience of connection with ancestors who died before she was born through the stories that are told around the ofrenda, much as we see in the experience of the children in the film.

Esparza, O. “Día de Los Muertos Altars.” Journal of Folklore and Education, vol. 2022, no. 9, Sept. 2022, 61-69. https://jfepublications.org/article/dia-de-los-muertos-altars/.

#Acawrimo accountability post 5. Today (Nov. 5), I read Bretton Varga's interview "'I'm a fellow traveler on a #religious journey': A Conversation with Kevin J. Burke" in the 2022.9 special issue of the *Journal of #Folklore in #Education* on #Death, Loss, & Remembrance Across Cultures (41-50).

I'll be honest, I almost skipped this one because it's an interview piece and I scrolled through the table of contents looking for something more likely to be a scholarly article in the format I've been taught to expect. But the whole point of doing folklore is recognizing a diversity of ways of knowing, so i stopped scrolling and started reading it. I'm glad I did because Varga and Burke have some things to say that are pertinent to my research on #DisneyPixar's recent turn to representations of #death and the #afterlife in #animated #films.

In talking about the #classroom, Burke points out that the space is "not inherently a #secular space, nor a #sacred space. Or rather, the space contains, or is contained by both" (44). In other words "because of the people who are in that space, " "the sacred always already exists there" (44). I would argue that the same is true of art generally and film specifically. The creators and enjoyers of art and film bring their #belief systems with them into the co-production of the text, whether those belief systems are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, Hindu, or secular.

Burke also points out that "secularisms are inherently religious endeavors because of the way they become shaped by the sacred traditions around them" (44). Ultimately, he is issuing a call for teachers to, as part of embedding themselves in their communities, become literate in the religious practices of their students in order to be able to reach them (47). This certainly rings true based on my experiences of how to be successful teaching student populations dominated by Seventh-day Adventists, Muslims, and atheists (at three different unis) while a devout, though frequently heretical and unabashedly progressive, United Methodist.

Running through the conversation as Burke and Varga make connections with the rest of the issue is the conviction that the boundaries between sacred and secular are neither rigid nor fixed. In my monograph, I talk about the way that religions, in the traditional faith in divinity sense, has provided people with some necessary structures for how to live and be in community. As people in the US have moved away from these belief systems, the need for those structures has not disappeared. Fandoms and affinity groups have taken up the many of the social functions that people used to find in their house of worship (Koppy, 2021, p. 21).

Particularly in #Soul, I think the idea of a secularism that reflects its environment is apparent. There is no deity, and the system of the before-and-afterlife seems to be run in an orderly and scientific way, complete with vast server room full of files. But it represents a teleology. Souls move in one direction from the Great Before to the Great Beyond, acquiring individuality through their experience of life on earth.

#Academodon #litodons
https://jfepublications.org/article/im-a-fellow-traveler-on-a-religious-journey/