Death and Grief in the Landscape: Private Memorials in Public Space

Abstract

This article discusses private, informal memorialisation practices that mark scenes and sites of death in public spaces and places. It focuses on changing practices of public visibilities of death and grief – practices that render visible in a semiotic way what would otherwise be invisible or relatively unknown occurrences of death. It argues that roadside memorials and other types of informal public memorials bring to consciousness and signification spaces and places that might otherwise be perceived as death neutral or untouched by death.

Memorialisation during COVID-19: implications for the bereaved, service providers and policy makers

“…68 But this public memorial practice has recently been supplemented with smaller and more temporary memorials or shrines established in honour of the deceased at accident or crime scenes. 69 These informal memorials are collective in the sense that they are contributed to by various individuals, but are not public in the sense of requiring institutional permissions and public ceremony. Collective tributes in digital space take this one step further.…”

Patterns of disaster commemoration in long‐term recovery

“…Recent studies show that commemorative displays are not limited to long‐term recovery. The emergence of roadside memorials (Reid ; Gibson ), spontaneous memorials (Haney and others ; Doss ), hurricane graffiti (Alderman and Ward ), and informal flood markers (McEwen and others 2012) have all been documented during the short‐term recovery. Rather than serve future growth or development, these grassroots commemorations perform three distinct, interlocking functions: grief work, communication, and community formation (Eyre ).…”

Crowdsourcing obituaries in the digital age: ABC Open’s In Memory Of

“…While obituaries have evolved to become more egalitarian in the late 20th century, as Nigel Starck (2002: xi) points out, the exclusivity of the genre has endured to the present day. Indeed, numerous studies of obituaries over the past 30 years have shown that ‘the lives and deaths of women and other publicly marginalised identity groups are … under-represented in public memorial culture’ more generally (Bytheway and Johnson, 1996; Fowler, 2007; Gibson, 2011: 147; Maybury, 1996). Therefore, as Judith Butler (2004) has argued, obituaries are a political type of representation: they are the ‘the means by which a life becomes, or fails to become, a publically grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, the means by which a life becomes note-worthy’ (p. 34).…”

“…Numerous scholars have shown that, in an era of online and social media, established practices of remembrance are evolving and new ones are developing. Work by Roberts (2004, 2012), Walter (2014), Gibson (2007, 2011), Veale (2004) and Graham et al (2015) has been foundational in mapping the cultural and historical development of online memorialisation. Following on from that scholarship, online memorialisation within Facebook and Instagram has received an increasing amount of attention, especially from Brubaker et al (2013), DeGroot (2012), Marwick and Ellison (2012) and Leaver and Highfield (2016).…”