The Mourning After: Mobile Media Mourning and Affective Witnessing

The Mourning After: Mobile Media Mourning and Affective Witnessing

In-person event

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About the Distinguished Lecture

From Instagram eulogies of human and more-than-human kin to witnessing mass human destruction on TikTok—mobile media practices play a significant role in contemporary grieving, memorializing, and mourning rituals in an age of permacrisis (permanent crisis). From the climate emergency feelings of ecogrief and the devastation of witnessing war and death to the individual loss of our human and more-than-human loved ones, our mobile devices bear witness to the intimate, affective, embodied and collective ways we mourn in, and through, contemporary media. While all witnessing is effective, I suggest that the embodied and intimate dimensions of mobile media create and curate different possibilities and relationalities. In this talk, I draw on my Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, which seeks to understand the role of mobile media mourning rituals as a reflection of our social, cultural, and emotional lives.

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Speaker Biography:

Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth is a socially-engaged artist and digital ethnographer. Hjorth has two decades experience working in interdisciplinary, collaborative, playful and socially innovative digital media methods to explore intergenerational relationships in cross-cultural contexts. Hjorth has explored the socio-cultural dimensions of mobile media in many contexts such as Japan, South Korea, China and Australia.

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Host or Publisher RMIT Professorial Academy