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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.

Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters' suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. About the Authors ix 1. Throughout this book, the two children will be referred to as Laerke and MIV.

This article presents results from a research project investigating young cancer patients’ general use of social media and their lived experience of the choices and dilemmas involved in using social media in relation to moments of existential crisis. This article’s key finding—based on an extensive survey with 205 young cancer patients and 25 qualitative interviews—is that social media becomes increasingly important for young people after a cancer diagnosis and that these young people engage with social media as—what we will call— vital media. The analysis in this article focuses on affective and temporal media experiences in the empirical material collected and argues that three dimensions of “media vitality” are salient: (1) that young people engage with social media to actively produce vitality in terms of generating a sense of wellbeing or balance by sharing, seeking out, or avoiding particular types of cancer-related content; (2) that young people experience social media as a vital or “lively” technology that introduces unpredictable and sometimes unwanted material into their lives; and (3) that young people feel they are expected to perform or share vital approaches to illness on social media, such as positive or life-affirming—as opposed to negative or pessimistic—accounts of their illness. In this way, the concept of “vital media” addresses strategic, ecological, and cultural aspects of young cancer patients’ social media engagements.

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'.

The article presents a yet unexplored framework for analysing the multidimensionality and dis/connections of participatory processes and their outcomes by using the concept of the ‘assemblage’ (DeLanda, 2006). The case is an eight-month collaboration between a task force initiated by Central Denmark Region, the socio-economic company Sager der Samler, and citizens. The collaboration is aimed at bringing together and working across various institutional and user perspectives to act on a societal challenge. The analysis is theoretically based on a review of existing theories of participation and typologies for analysing and evaluating participation. In particu- lar, the analysis focuses on the assemblage approach as a way of acknowledging the institutional, affective, mate- rial and power-related complexity of participatory processes. The assemblage approach helps to analytically stress that the process under investigation should be evaluated both with a more traditional focus on decision-making or power allocation, as well as taking into account the social, personal-affective and material benefits produced, and the potential for change in the relationship between public administration and citizens.

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