‘We do it to keep him alive’: bereaved individuals’ experiences of online suicide memorials and continuing bonds

This paper presents draws on interviews with individuals who have experience of creating, maintaining and utilising Facebook sites in memory of a loved one who has died by suicide. We argue that Facebook enables the deceased to be an on-going active presence in the lives of the bereaved. We highlight the potential of the Internet (and Facebook in particular) as a new and emerging avenue for the continuation of online identities and continuing bonds. Our study offers unique insight into survivors’ experiences of engaging with the virtual presence of their deceased loved one: how mourners come and go online, how this evolves over time and how the online identity of the deceased evolves even after death. We discuss how Facebook provides new ways for people to experience and negotiate death by suicide and to memorialise the deceased, highlighting the positive impact of this for survivors’ mental health. Finally, we describe the creation of tension amongst those who manage their grief in different ways

In the Shadow of a Willow Tree: A Community Garden Experiment in Decolonising, Multispecies Research

In 2014 I commenced a postdoctoral project that involved collaboratively planting and maintaining a community garden on a block of land that was once part of the East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve in the so-called New England Tableland region of New South Wales, Australia. At the edge of this block of land is an introduced, invasive willow tree. In this article I write with and alongside the willow tree to interrogate the potential and limitations of anticolonial projects undertaken from colonial subject positions predicated on relations of social and environmental privilege. Anticolonial scholarly activism demands a critique of individual and institutional complicity with ongoing colonial power structures. The following analysis offers a personal narrative of what it has been like to be involved in an anticolonial multispecies research project while working within the confines of the neoliberal university. Exploring the intersection of academic, social and environmental ecologies, I position the community garden as an alternative pedagogical and public environmental humanities research site that interrupts the reproduction of settler colonial power relations by cultivating tactics of collective resistance in alliance with the nonhuman world

Cultural Goods, Motivations and Consumer Behaviour.

There is wide theoretical consensus on the fact that present-day urban economic development is largely culture-led. This means that cities are special places for the production and consumption of symbolic goods. Urban economic performance depends on the administrative competence of local policy-makers to organize creative resources, talents and cultural images. Cities are cultural clusters, requiring closer attention to the factors that foster co-operative processes, the development of cultural activities and cultural consumption patterns. In this paper we focus on the last process. The motivations and expectations of cultural consumers are crucial elements for understanding the efficacy of the urban supply of cultural goods. Our empirical study, based on a sample of visitors to the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, first describes the visitor features of an artistic good and then investigates the emotional-cognitive content of the visit itself

Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota

Explores mental health needs of Native women working as prostitutes; their experience of sexual or physical violence and homelessness; use of shelters, rape crisis centers, and substance abuse treatment; and role of culture. Makes policy recommendations

Older Artists and Acknowledging Ageism

Intergenerational (IG) learning has the potential to reinforce ageist ideas, through the culturally produced binary of old and young which often describes IG learning. This research with older artists revealed implicit age bias associated with a modernist tradition in art education which minimized the value of art production viewed as feminine. Language associated with ageism shares the descriptors of the feminine and seep into our perceptions. Cooperative action research with multi-age participants facilitated personal growth and through critical reflection, implicit ageism revealed in the researcher’s prior perspective is revealed

Striking a Chord: Dementia and Song

We have co-written this piece to relay what can be achieved with song and music in familial and non-familial settings when caring for a person with dementia. This article started as a conversation we had in the Wellcome Collection cafe in London to catch up with each other while Prabhjot was en route from Canada to India, to meet her father. We shared how dementia was becoming a part of our parents’ lives. This article is dedicated to the chords Prabhjot Parmar has struck with her father, Major Harbhajan Singh (25 Dec 1925 – 16 April 2018) and Nirmal Puwar has had the pleasure of sharing with her mother, Kartar Kaur. Both of us have been drawn to understanding how our own performance of song with our respective parent enabled them and us to maintain a register of connection. Song became a means of trying to keep striking a parental and musical chord. We aimed to connect by engendering ‘therapeutic atmospheres’ (Sonntag 2016) through song. We use song and music interchangeably, operating with performance as an umbrella term that includes gesture, utterance, dance, singing and playing musical instruments, for example. Two autoethnographic relational contributions provide a substantive basis to our article, each written by a researcher-carer-daughter, seeking to sustain contact with what remains in her parent living with dementia

Things of the ground: Children's medicine, motherhood and memory in the Cameroon grassfields

Copyright @ 2011 Cambridge University PressSoon after birth, infants in the Cameroon Grassfields chiefdom of Oku are submitted by their parents to rites known generically as ‘children's medicine’ (k∂fu ∂bwan). Ostensibly performed to protect infants from harm and illness, the rites are in fact fraught with tension: they embrace contradictory perspectives regarding the social role of the mother and belie the normative ideal extolling her as a figure of nurture and protection. The article argues that, beyond their overt purpose and symbolism as rites of passage, the rites evoke collective memories of child abductions and contemporary anxieties regarding the anticipated departure of older children and adolescents into foster care or migrant labour. Going beyond a classic tripartite model, the article takes a long-term view that sees life-crisis rituals as a form of collective memory that bears witness to social tensions that cannot be resolved – in this case the contradictions inherent within the hallowed image of the mother and the compromised nature of parental love

MeritPatch - Family Collaborative Activities

There is no doubt that the modern family is very busy and disrupted by outside influences. Social trends and expectations have caused many families to become disconnected. There is research that points to overuse of technology as one culprit. Other research suggests that lack of spiritualism has negatively affected families. Regardless of the cause, it can be argued that the more disconnect within a family, the more likely it is for family members to experience negative social, emotional and/or health related issues as well as broken relationships. This study seeks to define family interactions and activities that support a healthy family lifestyle for all members and to create a system by which a family can feel a sense of accomplishment and pride through shared interactions. The study will use design thinking methodology to research through advice interviews and iteratively design based on feedback

The CENDARI White Book of Archives

Over the course of its four year project timeline, the CENDARI project has collected archival descriptions and metadata in various formats from a broad range of cultural heritage institutions. These data were drawn together in a single repository and are being stored there. The repository contains curated data which has been manually established by the CENDARI team as well as data acquired from small, ‘hidden’ archives in spreadsheet format or from big aggregators with advanced data exchange tools in place. While the acquisition and curation of heterogeneous data in a single repository presents a technical challenge in itself, the ingestion of data into the CENDARI repository also opens up the possibility to process and index them through data extraction, entity recognition, semantic enhancement and other transformations. In this way the CENDARI project was able to act as a bridge between cultural heritage institutions and historical researchers, insofar as it drew together holdings from a broad range of institutions and enabled the browsing of this heterogeneous content within a single search space. This paper describes a broad range of ways in which the CENDARI project acquired data from cultural heritage institutions as well as the necessary technical background. In exemplifying diverse data creation or acquisition strategies, multiple formats and technical solutions, assets and drawbacks of a repository, this “White Book” aims at providing guidance and advice as well as best practices for archivists and cultural heritage institutions collaborating or planning to collaborate with infrastructure projects. http://www.cendari.eu/thematic- research-guides/white-book-archives The CENDARI White Book of Archives. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/2262/7568