"It's been said that Oaxacans "believe in images." Visual manifestations of saints and loved ones are a fundamental part of life there. Oaxacans also seem to have a special relationship with La Santa Muerte, a female reaper-like figure whose cult has grown rapidly as violence in Mexico has increased
...
. In this book, Myriam Lamrani recontextualizes Santa Muerte within Mexican Catholicism by looking at how intimately devotees interact with images (including effigies, tattoos, artworks, photographs, even dreams) of the infamous saint. For Lamrani, focusing on the intimate modalities through which people interact with their images offers insight into religious, social, and political life, as well as anthropology itself. The "media turn" in anthropology often considers religion as mediation, and media as a bridge with the divine. Lamrani suggests that it is intimacy with (rather than mediation through) such images that make the dead, be they former humans (loved ones) or divine entities (Santa Muerte), present for the living. She is essentially using aesthetics and affect theory to make intimacy her theoretical frame, rather than visual analysis or the "media turn." The manuscript has six chapters divided into three sections. The first section explores what constitutes an image, how to move beyond the idea of it as medium, and how dreams play into these ideas. Part two unpacks her ideas about intimacy, particularly "devotional intimacy" and the "very special dead" (loved ones and saints). The final section covers how images transcend boundaries through different scales of intimacy, from an individual's devotion to their ofrenda (altar) to the Mexican nation's famously intimate relationship with death. A conclusion reflects on devotion to Santa Muerte in Mexico within the landscape of popular religion and political unrest, and summarizes the central argument of this book that "intimacy-understood as a scalable index of closeness which traverses all spheres of sociality-is an anthropological tool to make sense of how people "understand their worlds." (Publisher description)
more
"Journalists have often been considered the "fourth emergency service". They are first on the scene, alongside paramedics, fi re and police, running towards danger rather than away, and providing independent, veritable and crucial information in the public interest. And yet, unlike frontline workers
...
, little (if any) counselling or training is offered to journalists on how to deal with the horrors they witness, and the trauma they absorb from being at the forefront of human suffering. Further, limited to no training is given to student journalists on how to prepare themselves for trauma, be it from war scenes to the everyday "death knock". New research is demonstrating a rise in post-traumatic stress disorder amongst journalists resulting from the "everyday" trauma they encounter. There is also a noticeable increase in reluctance from new journalists to undertake emotionally distressing assignments. Editors in industry are now calling for educators to invest in curricula that centre around understanding how to cope with distress and trauma, and why work like this is vital to facilitate the work journalists do hold power to account. This book investigates the cause and effect of trauma reporting on the journalist themselves and provides a toolkit for training journalists and practitioners to build resilience and prepare themselves for trauma. It draws on national and international experiences enabling readers to gain valuable insight into a range of contemporary issues and the contexts in which they may work. This edited book offers a blend of academic research studies, evidence-based practitioner interviews, and teaching resources drawing on the experiences of journalists and academics nationally and internationally." (Abstract)
more
"Digital Religion refers to the contemporary practice and understanding that religion takes place in both online and offline contexts, and how these contexts intersect with each other. Scholars in this growing field of Digital Religion studies recognize that religion has been influenced by its engag
...
ement with computer-mediated digital spaces, including not only the Internet, but other emerging technologies, such as mobile phones, digital wearables, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Religion provides a comprehensive overview of religion as seen and performed through various platforms and cultural spaces created by digital technology. The text covers religious interaction with a wide range of digital media forms (including social media, websites, gaming environments, virtual and augmented realities, and artificial intelligence) and highlights examples of technological engagement and negotiation within the major world religions (i.e., Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism). Additional sections cover the global manifestations of religious community, identity, ethics, and authority, with a final group of chapters addressing emerging technologies and the future of the field." (Publisher description)
more
"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video ga
...
mes and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations." (Publisher description)
more
"Die Medienlandschaft behandelt täglich die Motive Sterben, Tod und Jenseits. Bilderbücher und Graphic Novels stehen bei diesen Themen meist nicht im Fokus, doch die Anzahl an entsprechenden Veröffentlichungen steigt stetig. Welche Bilder nutzen sie zur Darstellung der komplexen Thematik? Wie wir
...
d die größtenteils junge Zielgruppe dabei berücksichtigt? Birte Svea Philippi zeigt anhand einer quantitativen Erhebung sowie qualitativ an Fallbeispielen, welche gemeinsamen Bildideen die Autor*innen von Bilderbüchern und Graphic Novels aufgreifen. Mit ihrem kunstpädagogischen Ansatz fokussiert sie auf Mittel, Motive und Metaphern, die zur Ansprache von Kindern und Jugendlichen genutzt werden." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
more
"Über das Medium Computerspiel findet zunehmend eine Auseinandersetzung mit psychologischen Traumata statt. Posttraumatische Belastungsstörung, Krankheit und Tod sowie Depressionen und Phobien sind hierbei vorherrschende Themen und Motive. Thomas Spies zeigt in einem historischen Überblick und in
...
vergleichenden Analysen Tendenzen der kulturellen Repräsentation auf. Die Beschäftigung mit Titeln wie »Papers, Please«, »Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice« und »Disco Elysium« lässt deutlich werden, wie Computerspiele zunehmend medienspezifische Möglichkeiten finden, die Vielfalt und Komplexität traumatischer Erfahrungen zu vermitteln." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
more
"This article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nati
...
onalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane ‘heart-warming’ moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and ‘the West’, especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the ‘correct collective memory’ of a nationalised tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterised by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and ‘the West’ in the global imaginary, which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativisations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two." (Abstract)
more
"This article is a study of mourning among Shi’a Muslims during the COVID-19 pandemic through a call-in talk show called #IAMHUSSEINI. By analyzing the discourses of callers and presenters and locating them within a visual context of the television studio, this article shows how the viewership of
...
#IAMHUSSEINI constitutes a televisual majlis (Arabic: ‘assembly’) composed of more than passive asynchronous consumption and resembling what Patrick Eisenlohr refers to as ‘atmospheres’. This article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic drove #IAMHUSSEINI to recalibrate to expectations of a spatially proximate ritual, rather than sustaining a ‘natively digital’ aesthetic, repurposing Richard Rogers’ approach to digital methods. This change brought about a tacit understanding of the televisual majlis among #IAMHUSSEINI’s viewers. This article therefore posits a difference between ‘spatial intercorporeality’, in which bodies are mediated by spatial proximity, and ‘functional intercorporeality’, in which they are mediated by the material preconditions of a shared activity." (Abstract)
more
"[...] The past does not really exist: it is only a story we tell ourselves. But what happens when we tell this story not only to ourselves but also to our followers, when it is recorded not only on our social media pages but also on the pages of hundreds or thousands of others, making it something
...
that can be viewed and referenced forever? Social media networks are becoming vast digital archives in which the past merges seamlessly with the present, slowly erasing our capacity to forget. And yet at the same time, our memory is being outsourced to systems that we don't control and that could become obsolete at any time, cutting us off from our memories and risking total oblivion." (Back cover)
more
"This resource is a guide for how you can use story-sharing in your church programmes to address grief and stress. It includes practical ideas on how to run What’s Your Story? story-sharing exercises to help your church members." (Page 5)
"Indigenous Digital Life offers a broad, wide-ranging account of how social media has become embedded in the lives of indigenous Australians. Centring on ten core themes-including identity, community, hate, desire and death-we seek to understand both the practice and broader politics of being Indige
...
nous on social media. Rather than reproducing settler narratives of Indigenous 'deficiency', we approach Indigenous social media as a space of Indigenous action, production, and creativity; we see Indigenous social media users as powerful agents, who interact with and shape their immediate worlds with skill, flair and nous; and instead of being 'a people of the past', we show that indigenous digital life is often future-orientated, working towards building better relations, communities and worlds." (Publisher description)
more
"This third edition has been thoroughly updated to incorporate the latest research and developments, including the rise of Big Data, AI, and the Internet of Things. The book's case studies and pedagogical material have also been extensively revised and updated to include such watershed events as the
...
Snowden revelations, #Gamergate, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, privacy policy developments, and the emerging Chinese Social Credit System. New sections include "Death Online," "Slow/Fair Technology", and material on sexbots. The "ethical toolkit" that introduces prevailing ethical theories and their applications to the central issues of privacy, copyright, pornography and violence, and the ethics of cross-cultural communication online, has likewise been revised and expanded. Each topic and theory are interwoven throughout the volume with detailed sets of questions, additional resources, and suggestions for further research and writing." (Back cover)
more
"The book covers a variety of matters that have been neglected in other research texts, for example: the legal, ethical, and philosophical conundrums of Digital Afterlife; the ways digital media are currently being used to expand the possibilities of commemorating the dead and managing the grief of
...
those left behind. Our lives are shaped by and shape the creation of our Digital Afterlife as the digital has become a taken for granted aspect of human experience. This book will be of interest to undergraduates from computing, theology, business studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and education from all types of institutions. Secondary audiences include researchers and postgraduate researchers with an interest in the digital. At a practical level, the cost of data storage and changing data storage systems mitigate the likelihood of our digital presence existing in perpetuity. Whether we create accidental or intentional digital memories, this has psychological consequences for ourselves and for society. Essentially, the foreverness of forever is in question." (Publisher description)
more
"This article focuses on ethical challenges for journalists when contacting and interviewing vulnerable sources about grief in connection with crime and accidents. The study is based on in-depth interviews, with bereaved closely related to the deceased, about their encounters with journalists. Resul
...
ts suggest editorial structures can contribute to violations, and the media attention can disturb and postpone the grieving process. When journalists no longer are interested, mourning relatives can feel abandoned. Paradoxically, proper ethical behavior from journalists can make this worse since respondents can feel more abandoned and even betrayed by journalists they consider sympathetic." (Abstract)
more
"This study focuses on the meanings fans ascribe to the death of fictional characters. Previous research on this topic has been predominantly quantitative in nature, concerned with correlations between the consumption of fictional narratives and people’s coping mechanisms and attitudes. In contras
...
t this paper provides a contextualized account of how the mourning of fictional characters works in practice by revealing the underlying meaning making process of this kind of grief and exploring how this is related to people’s everyday lives. By analysing 15 in-depth interviews, this article concludes that these respondents actively utilise fictional narratives of death for reflecting on personal loss; contemplating unexperienced situations and feelings, and more generally, coping with the prospect of death." (Abstract)
more
"Most of Iran’s urban population experienced the war with Iraq (1980–1988) through the burden of privation and the fear of possible airstrikes. Thus, state-produced media on national television became the main apparatus through which they connected their daily lives to the national conflict. Rav
...
ayat-e Fath [The Narrative of Triumph] was one docudrama, comprised of five seasons that the state produced at different intervals between 1984 and 1987. Although Ravayat-e Fath has been presented and received as a journalistic work, it enters the realm of fiction to fulfill its objective: To recruit soldiers. Through a collage of mythical stories, epic narratives, dramatic cinematography, mourning songs accompanied by reports from war fronts, and live interviews with soldiers, the series tells a story of a promised triumph through martyrdom. Through studying Ravayat-e Fath, the most important state-supported television production of the Iran-Iraq war era, this article investigates the ways in which war propaganda in general, and the concept of martyrdom in particular, generated tools like shaming to control the population during and after the war." (Abstract)
more
"The book provides an historical and theoretical context to risk culture and the work of war correspondents, paying particular attention to the changing nature of technology, organisational structures and the role of witnessing. The conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are examined to highlight
...
how risk and the calculations of risk vary according to the type of conflict. The focus is on the relationship between propaganda, censorship, the sourcing of information and the challenges of reporting war in the digital world. The authors then move on to discuss the arguments around risk in relation to gender and war reporting and the coverage of death on the battlefield." (Back cover)
more