#acawrimo — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #acawrimo, aggregated by home.social.
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CW: #AcaWriMo notes post #DH #AlternativeHistoriographies
#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/
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CW: #AcaWriMo notes post #DH #AlternativeHistoriographies
#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/
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CW: #AcaWriMo notes post #DeathDenial, maybe not so much
#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.
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CW: #AcaWriMo notes post #DeathDenial, maybe not so much
#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.
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CW: #AcaWriMo notes post #VirtualAfterlives
#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 -
CW: #AcaWriMo notes post #VirtualAfterlives
#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 -
CW: #AcaWriMo reading notes: #Thanatology
#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/
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CW: #AcaWriMo reading notes: #Thanatology
#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/
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#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/ -
#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/ -
#Acawrimo accountability post 4. For Nov. 4, I'm going to post brief notes about two short pieces in the 2022.9 special issue of the *Journal of #Folklore in #Education* on #Death, Loss, & Remembrance Across Cultures
--Ashley Minner's "Riding With James: More than a #Map" (25-35)
--Browning Neddau's "A Conversation with #Nokmes (My Grandmother) in #Poetry" (36-40)Each of these is a personal reflection about relationships with the dead by indigenous people, and though neither is from the indigenous groups that Wright-Maley drew on in the article I wrote about yesterday, their reflections illustrate the broad-brush generalization of the differences between #SettlerTime and #IndigenousTime.
Minner writes about learning the history of an area in East #Baltimore that had been a #Lumbee Reservation through conversations with her elder cousin (before his death) and his age peers. Together they annotate an existing map, then draw their, own maps, and then just Minner and her cousin drive through the mapped area, talk to the people there now, eat lunch, and tell stories.
The first map Minner brings to the group of elders had been made by a white anthropologist for a federal government report (28). This map represents historical knowledge based on the evidentiary record available to the anthropologist. It is ultimately incomplete and unsatisfying because it does not represent the lived reality of the Lumbee who had homes, businesses, and lives there. Their maps begin from the same grid but add significantly more depth and nuance to the representation of the Lumbee Reservation. Their folk knowledge is essential to actually understanding this geographic place, its past, and its present.
In her conclusion, Minner notes that her cousin James lives on in the stories of their community, in the continuity of the language, and in the actions of people continuing to walk in his footsteps, both metaphorically and literally (33).
Helpfully, Minner offers a brief lesson plan based on the experiences she shared in this reflection.
Neddeau also emphasizes the importance of stories, connecting the importance of telling the community's stories to the #Potawatomi's charge to "keep the fire burning" among the #Anishinaabe peoples (37).
The personal reflection in this piece tells the story of Neddeau's process of creation, revisiting the stories of his grandmother's early life, recalling his memories of her, and bringing her into his present for a conversation in the form of a poem.
One idea that stands out to me in this reflection is the importance of listening. It's not unusual to have the importance of telling a community's or a person's stories emphasized, but Neddeau also talks about the importance of listening. It's incredibly obvious, but the reminder was like a lightbulb for me--we can only tell the stories we've heard, the ones we've listened to enough times to recall and to tell ourselves.
My own grandmother turned 98 this year, and we can all see her life on this earth approaching its end. I appreciate the reminder to listen in order to tell. As a widow, I have often also felt like the curator of my late husband's life, choosing the stories that I tell his children. In short, I guess, even as a non-indigenous person, the way of relating to the dead presented by these two reflections resonates with me a lot, and I think they describe an important truth about humanity's relationship to our dead in general.
https://jfepublications.org/article/riding-with-james/
https://jfepublications.org/article/a-conversation-with-nokmes-my-grandmother-in-poetry/
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#Acawrimo accountability post 2. On Nov. 2, I started reading the 2022.9 special issue of the *Journal of #Folklore in #Education* on #Death, Loss, & Remembrance Across Cultures.
In "(Re)tracings of What Was once Present/Absent," their introduction to the special issue, guest editors Bretton A. Varga and Mark E. Helmsing lay out their personal experiences of living with and making sense of death and grief and extrapolate 1) why these aspects of the human experience are important to consider in educational spaces, and 2) how the discipline of folklore can help.
Pertinent to my interests, Varga notes his own experience of having narrative depictions of death influence his own expectations and understanding of this aspect of life (1). Together Helmsing and Varga call on educators to recognize #grief as "way of relating to the world" (2).
Both of these ideas--the impact of narrative and grief as a lens--demand that we recognize the cultural boundedness of grief. Different cultures, and even different contexts within shared culture, will respond to death/loss differently and have their own expressions of grief. Helmsing & Varga call for the application of Ladson-Billing's (1995) model of culturally relevant pedagogy that is "concerned with three aspects of education: student learning/growth, cultural competence, and critical consciousness" (4).
They conclude with reference to the body of literature about #GhostStories and #hauntology theory (5-6).
My reading annotations make connections between all of this and the #DisneyPixar films in which I've been looking at depictions of the afterlife. This chapter gets me closer to theorizing some things I've been noodling about and offers a rich trove of further sources to look at.
#Academodon #literature #litodons
https://jfepublications.org/article/2022intro/ -
#Acawrimo accountability post 2. On Nov. 2, I started reading the 2022.9 special issue of the *Journal of #Folklore in #Education* on #Death, Loss, & Remembrance Across Cultures.
In "(Re)tracings of What Was once Present/Absent," their introduction to the special issue, guest editors Bretton A. Varga and Mark E. Helmsing lay out their personal experiences of living with and making sense of death and grief and extrapolate 1) why these aspects of the human experience are important to consider in educational spaces, and 2) how the discipline of folklore can help.
Pertinent to my interests, Varga notes his own experience of having narrative depictions of death influence his own expectations and understanding of this aspect of life (1). Together Helmsing and Varga call on educators to recognize #grief as "way of relating to the world" (2).
Both of these ideas--the impact of narrative and grief as a lens--demand that we recognize the cultural boundedness of grief. Different cultures, and even different contexts within shared culture, will respond to death/loss differently and have their own expressions of grief. Helmsing & Varga call for the application of Ladson-Billing's (1995) model of culturally relevant pedagogy that is "concerned with three aspects of education: student learning/growth, cultural competence, and critical consciousness" (4).
They conclude with reference to the body of literature about #GhostStories and #hauntology theory (5-6).
My reading annotations make connections between all of this and the #DisneyPixar films in which I've been looking at depictions of the afterlife. This chapter gets me closer to theorizing some things I've been noodling about and offers a rich trove of further sources to look at.
#Academodon #literature #litodons
https://jfepublications.org/article/2022intro/