On 9 August 2014, Michael Brown, a young man of barely 18 years, was killed by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, which renewed discourse surrounding the occurrences of racial violence in the United States enacted at the hands of police. Brown’s death led to the development of a hashtag movement called #HandsUpDontShoot on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, which critiqued the disparate treatment of racial minorities and the excessive use of (often deadly) force by police on black bodies. #HandsUpDontShoot offers an example how the convergence of subjectivities occurs affectively: the hashtag, while making a discursive appeal to consider Michael Brown’s rumoured stance of surrender when he was shot by Wilson, also featured photos of movement participants recreating his pose with their own bodies. Further, the embodied affect of the movement overlapped and entangled with that of offline spaces, where protesters on the ground in Ferguson and other communities began to raise their hands above their head in a desire to not only create an external spectacle of Brown’s victimhood, but to live within the subjectivity of his abject body. Through a media ecology analysis, I argue that the subjectivity of Brown’s body was kept alive through the movement, as the hashtag and associated imagery can be seen as material extensions of Michael Brown’s body and a desire to make sense of Brown’s death through an affective exchange with the body in peril. In this sense, the participants of #HandsUpDontShoot transformed the movement from a space for standing with the victim to a state of standing within the body in peril.
Children experiencing the death of baby brother or sister have reported individual, familial, and communicative challenges. Siblings also have indicated that the loss of a baby in their family enriched their lives despite their pain. The present study extends this work by focusing not only on siblings but also other children enmeshed in the family system. Additionally, we heed the call for the use of arts-based methods in family communication by performing a visual narrative analysis of children's baby loss remembrance drawings. This analysis of 131 drawings completed by children ages zero to 18 yielded three main themes, including narration of identity, narration of life and death, and narration of growing sense-making. Two continua capture these themes, including the subject of narrativization and the mode of narrativization. In presenting these findings, we provide a unique (means of) understanding children's experience of baby loss in the family. The field of family communication studies was created with the goal of understanding the unique experiences of the family unit. However, though conceptions of family and the experiences of family members have become increasingly complicated, the methodological approaches family communication scholars use have remained relatively fixed (Droser, 2017; Suter, 2016). In line with the recently proposed critical family communication approach (see Suter, 2016), the current study begins to push the boundaries of what is considered within the purview of family communication studies by embracing a complicated and understudied topic-bereaved children's experience of the death of a baby in the family-and engaging a less traditional type of research method-visual narrative analysis. This work explicitly answers Faulkner's (2016) call for more arts-based research within the field. Through enacting a visual
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