This article offers a conceptual framework of Facebook’s sub-platforms: Profiles, Groups, and Pages. We demonstrate the crucially different affordances that these sub-platforms possess, and the ...various resulting social practices and dynamics that they enable. With mourning and memorialization as a case study, our findings point at emergent practices ranging along a personal-to-public spectrum of communicative functions and media uses: Profiles offer a personal quality, albeit differently for the bereaved’s Profile and the deceased’s Profile; Groups possess a hybrid nature, combining self-expression alongside public aspects, reviving thus premodern bereaved communities; and Pages possess a distinctly public quality, serving as online memorialization centers where the deceased becomes an icon and a resource for mobilizing broad social change. This comparative and integrated approach may be applied productively to other contexts and other social media (sub-)platforms.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, people and families experienced a new and sudden situation that forced them to stay in their homes for a long period (February 25- May 26). In this context, ...many people found themselves in great difficulty, not only because of the fear of contagion or the economic problems deriving from the closure of production activities but also because the virus profoundly changed the way of life in society. The "Social distancing" concept became central in all personal relationships, including close family relationships. In this situation, our paper seeks to understand the role of spirituality and religiosity in reacting to this difficult situation and in particular on the physical and psychological health of the people involved. The data we present here are part of a multidisciplinary research with a quantitative theoretical framework. As the data was collected during the first Italian lockdown, a total of 1,250 adults from all over Italy participated in the on-line questionnaire. Among the main results it emerged that the participants perceived lower levels of spiritual well-being and mental health than the pre-pandemic situation with a significant gender difference; in fact, women perceived lower mental health than men. At the same time, it is evident that spirituality and religious practices are a protective factor connected not only with psychological and mental but also physical health. Finally, it appears evident that the family is a protective factor with respect to mental health, even in a period so full of stress factors, those who did not live alone and especially those who had to take care of small children reported higher perceived mental health and a greater ability to activate coping resources.
Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s Sovereign Attachments is a landmark monograph in the study of Islam in South Asia. This review approaches the book by way of three intersecting themes: the management of ...religious affect in the Indian subcontinent, past and present; the relationship between Muslim publics and what Khoja-Moolji calls ‘figurations’, or tropes (e.g. the ‘mourning mother’, the ‘brave soldier’, and so on) that are variously embodied and contested in contemporary Pakistani discourse; and the ways that Islamic normativities are constructed and mobilized by both the Taliban and the Pakistani state.
Resumo Quais são as dimensões sociais do luto por perda de um animal de companhia? Como é vivido no quotidiano, em práticas e rituais? E que implicações tem para a redefinição das fronteiras entre os ...humanos e os outros animais? Cruzando contributos dos Estudos dos Animais e da Sociologia da Vida Pessoal, este artigo propõe uma interpretação do luto por um animal a partir de um olhar triplo. Primeiro, a partir do lugar que os animais de companhia ocupam nas redes pessoais dos portugueses, e da relacionalidade da vida contemporânea. Segundo, olhando para as práticas e rituais específicos que, após a perda de um animal, continuam a tecer a fina teia que os integra nas vidas dos humanos. Terceiro, considerando as desigualdades que atravessam o luto em função da espécie, e que fazem não só com que se perpetue a excecionalidade do humano face aos outros animais, como que certas espécies não--humanas sejam vistas como mais dignas de luto do que outras.
This essay addresses the user remediation and performative rematerialization of the 2015 photographs of 3-year-old Kurdish-Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, as well as acts of concealing and deferring ...access to those images following intense public debate. This article shifts the frame of discussion from moral spectatorship to mediated witnessing and networked mourning in the context of contemporary affective publics. To speak of the memeification of Kurdi’s corpse-image is to underline the way repetition operates as a gesture of both inhabitation and differentiation by users who connect in this way to others and to the issue at hand. The Kurdi images, thus, were not so much observed by a global audience as produced by, and productive of, a massive, dispersed corporeal network. The conceptual figure of spectrality links the mediality and materiality of the dead body-image to contemporary necropolitics that dispossesses subjects, producing the ‘living death’ of the global precariat. If the public sphere is defined by prohibitions on grieving, conflicts regarding who views, mourns, and speaks for which dead bodies, although often ascribed to debased social media mores, tell us more about the political border of human and nonhuman that produces the revenant figure of the refugee haunting inhospitable and neoliberal, but nominally post-racial, Europe.
In August and October 1982-1988, we collected 880 mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) in southeastern New Mexico to determine amounts and kinds of food items ingested and to evaluate variation in ...feeding habits by sex, age, time of day, month, and year. Crop contents did not differ significantly by sex, but did differ significantly by age, month, and year. Differences by age group may reflect differences in foraging ability between subadults and adults. Differences by month probably reflect differences in availability of food items. Differences by year may be related to differences in annual precipitation, although no such relationship was observed in this study. Crop contents also differed significantly by time of day collected, but this likely reflects activity patterns of birds and not true differences in diet.
Focusing on the post-bankruptcy reactions of former Lehman Brothers' bankers, we build a model of organizational mourning that depicts the thoughts, feelings, and actions of individual members ...dealing with the loss of their organization. We argue that organizational mourning is a process comprised of five interrelated phases, namely: (1) "experiencing the death event," (2) "remembering the organization," (3) "assessing loss," (4) "salvaging: evaluate and restore," and (5) "creating continuity and detaching." Our empirical case suggests that at its core, organizational mourning involves both holding on and letting go of a defunct organization. Understanding how former members mourn is crucial to appreciate how they may ultimately find continuity after an organizational death, including how they enact their subsequent career paths. We conclude by discussing implications for theory of our research-notably, for literatures on post-death organizing, and personal mourning-as well as implications for practice.
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