No abstract

In this article, we analyze 28 YouTube video tributes to fallen Danish soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq with two analytical goals. The goals are to first understand how the soldier as an object of communal grief is affectively and discursively established, discussed, and challenged in the videos and comments, and second to investigate what type of commemorative practices the specific media space of YouTube enables. Our first observation is that the videos' attempts to construct the soldiers as national heroes and common objects of grief are repeatedly disputed and opposed by the people commenting on them. Our second point is that YouTube allows for a new type of commemorative practice, which, unlike the traditional war monuments of the nation-state, is marked by explicit differences of opinion concerning the status and legitimacy of the war. The analysis draws on theoretical insights from the fields of affect theory, participatory culture, DIY media, and memory studies.

The article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places-a heritage that encompasses statues, buildings, Rhodes scholarship and the Rhodes Trust funds. We include a comparative study of the Facebook use of RMF as it demonstrates significant differences between the two places in the development of the student movements as political activism. Investigating in more detail the heritage politics of RMF at UCT we fledge out what we call an affective politics using non-representational bodily strategies. We argue that in order for actual social movements to mobilize in current political controversies, they need to put affective tactics to use.

This study looks at difficult heritage tourism as a form of visiting that to a great extent happens through the tourist's body as locus. Actual tourists are craving for real experiences in order to feel alive and difficult heritage sites offer this experience of presence to excess. In addition tourists are also interested in witnessing the past and its victims, and the establishment of the witnessing relationship depends on the interactive design present at the site. The difficult pasts in question are situated on site-specific locations in Northern America and Europe and represent classic thanatourist sites bearing on Holocaust, totalitarian communism and terrorism. Through an analysis of the multimodal and interactive design at each site, the article outlines various ways that place designs relate actual tourists and victims of the past.

No abstract

No abstract

a b s t r a c tThe paper presents an analysis of Climate Justice Fast, a campaign consisting of an international hunger strike against political in action on climate change. Within the theoretical framework of political online activism and theories of affect, we investigate the encoding and decoding of the starving activist bodies in relation to CJF. Our material consists of texts from the CJF website, activist blogs, and two online debates on a large Danish media platform. The methodological approach is discourse analytical and esthetic-affective. In our analysis we outline the different semantic significations of the starving bodies as central signifiers and we investigate the different affective responses to the hunger strike. We furthermore argue that the starved body seems to be relationally powerful, because of both its contagious ability to attune other bodies and its semantic 'wildness'.

No abstract