From the climate emergency feelings of ecological grief (ecogrief) and the devastation of witnessing war and death to the individual loss of our human and more-than-human loved ones, our mobile devices bear witness to the intimate, affective, embodied, and collective ways we mourn in, and through, contemporary media.

This Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, The Mourning After, aims to understand the role of mobile media mourning rituals as a reflection of our social, cultural, and emotional lives. As disasters, pandemics and war become more commonplace in and through mobile devices as affective witnesses, how can we learn from mourning practices as a reflection of contemporary media culture? How do these mobile media mourning practices reflect broader contemporary rituals and sensemaking about loss, kinship (living, dying and afterlives) and hope in a world of multiple permanent crisis (permacrisis)?

Through ethnography and creative practice methods, we explore multiple forms of loss—from eulogies about lost kin to more existential elegies about a loss of habitat—to connect it with kinship and hope to response to the overwhelming sense of permacrisis we face today.

Project ID: FT220100552