Introduction: Death, dying and participatory media + open section

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Digital remains, in the shape of devices and traces of digital content and interaction stored on the devices them selves and online, left behind by the deceased have come to play important parts in the lives of those who live on. With a posthumanist perspective we explore how user-driven engagement with digital remains are changing and diversifying existing practices related to loss and grieving. The digital remains can be seen to contain the “essence” of the deceased person embodied within the digital device. Based on interviews and observations gathered from the contexts of Israel, the UK and Sweden, we investigate the role of digital remains in bereavement and what implications the eventual obsolescence of these remains might have for continuing bonds. In doing so we seek to increase our understanding of the (post)human encounter with death and the human capabilities of digital remains.
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Wellbeing and Social Work, University of Hull

A Sort of Permanence: Digital Remains and Posthuman Encounters with Death

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This paper focuses on the murders of the Afzaal-Salman family in London, Ontario (Canada) in June, 2021. Immediately after the murders were reported, several hashtags on different social media emerged, focusing attention on the victims and commenting on the Islamophobia that resulted in their deaths. Through a critical discourse analysis of one of these hashtags, #OurLondonFamily that was used on Twitter and Instagram, this paper examines how grief becomes a conveyor of subjugated histories and experiences of Islamophobia, and a conduit through which the politics of identity surface. The paper argues that social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram allow for affective expressions of grief, demonstrating a networked sociality and articulating politics of opposition from the ground up. The affective publics that are engendered include activists and NGOs, whose social worthiness, high number of followers, coordinated and committed attention provides traction that allows for collective grieving that can be politically mobilized. As tactical trajectories, social media posts rupture the spectacle of a harmonious multicultural Canada.
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From the Ground Up: Tactical Mobilization of Grief in the Case of the Afzaal-Salman Family Killings

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In an age of social and digital media, users’ engagements with (social) media related to death, dying and mourning vary widely across different social and cultural contexts and changing platforms. Based on the discussion of selected examples, I illustrate how users’ social media engagements related to death, dying and mourning vary, depending on the narrative positions that sharers take up as <italic>tellers</italic>, <italic>co-tellers</italic> or <italic>witnesses</italic> to shared stories. As I will argue, the potential and limits of such engagements can be better understood in the context of three over-arching, dynamic modes of practices of hyper-mourning, namely <italic>entrepreneurial, connective</italic> and <italic>activist</italic>. These are associated with distinct types of <italic>affective positions</italic> for sharers, audiences and displays of affect, forming the basis for projecting participants’ identity and affective claims. The article shows how the way we die and mourn is extended as much as limited by social and digital media story affordances and norms.
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Affective positioning in hyper-mourning: sharers as tellers, co-tellers and witnesses

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This article analyses videos of men talking about and documenting their lack and growth of hair via Finasteride and Minoxidil. We explore these male self-representational videos on YouTube as a specific form of self-tracking enabled by the camera within a specific platformed environment. We argue that the camera is not solely a tool, but rather an aesthetic practice with performative effects. In other words, self-tracking must be understood as always already entangled in and inseparable from mediating and aesthetic processes. The article then outlines the main characteristics of self-tracking videos as a self-representational audio-visual genre, defining them as momental videos and longitudinal videos. It is our claim that these defining characteristics constitute the central aesthetic principles of Finasteride and Minoxidil self-tracking videos, but that they are also applicable to other forms of videos preoccupied with representing and tracking transformation.
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Center for Gender, Sexuality and Difference, Department for Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics

Showing progress. Defining self-tracking as an aesthetic audio-visual genre

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In 2020, Trapholt (a Danish museum of modern art, craft and design) and textile designer Iben Høj launched a grand collaborative art project involving almost 800 embroiderers. The project, named Stitches Beyond Borders, was part of the centenary celebratrions of Denmark’s reunification with Southern Jutland, and participants were asked to embroider their personal vision of borders. By using a mixed method approach we firstly analyse how Stitches Beyond Borders, as a collaborative art project, created a strong sense of community and cultivated creative agency. Secondly, we focus on the discursive nature of the female public created by the art project. Taking into account the rich and complex history of embroidery as an underestimated female activity tied to repressive power mechanisms, we discuss whether the project ends up merely (re)creating an innocuous female public by favouring a personal take on the border theme.
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Threads of participation: Crafting female agency in a collaborative art project in Denmark

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 12 (2024): Issue 1 (June 2024)

Volume 11 (2024): Issue 1 (March 2024)

Volume 10 (2023): Issue 1 (October 2023)

Volume 9 (2022): Issue 2 (October 2022)

Volume 9 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 8 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021) Health, Media and Participation

Volume 7 (2020): Issue 2 (October 2020) Failures in Cultural Participation

Volume 7 (2020): Issue 1 (July 2020) Feminism, Gender, Social Movements and Everyday Resistance

Volume 6 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019) Cultural Participation, Social Media Affect and Art

Volume 5 (2018): Issue 1 (May 2018) Community and Creative Research. Developing Participatory Methodologies

Volume 4 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017) Playful Participation II

Volume 3 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016) Playful Participation

Volume 2 (2015): Issue 2 (December 2015) Participation across Institutional and Disciplinary Boundaries

Volume 2 (2015): Issue 1 (October 2015) Mediatized Cultural Activism

Volume 1 (2014): Issue 1 (November 2014) Participatory Cultural Citizenship

Conjunctions

Conjunctions seeks to create an international and transdisciplinary forum for the investigation of user-generated cultural production, user-driven cultural participation and citizen involvement across a variety of social fields, contexts and practices, e.g. urban spaces, (digital) media, social media platforms, education and teaching, the cultural sector and creative industries, aesthetic productions and museums, health institutions, activism and design.  The overall focus of the journal is to explore the socially transformative and democratic potential of cultural participation processes, to qualify the academic understanding of what ‘participation’ is and what it involves, and to discuss the complex relations created between user-generated processes and established institutions and discourses.  We take an interest in critical analyses of participatory practices, rhetoric and involvement strategies, in affirmative investigations of participation, in explorations of explicit or conscious and implicit or non-conscious forms of participation.  Submitted articles can be focused on theoretical development or on empirical analysis (of e.g. case studies). We also welcome work that use innovative or creative methods as well as more traditional methods.  The journal invites submissions from a variety of disciplinary fields such as media and communication studies, cultural studies, interaction and participatory design, cultural geography, education, aesthetics, science and technology studies, health care, health communication, information science, sociology, anthropology, development studies and gender studies.  The journal is published twice every year.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 