Death, remembering and media in community settings
This extended abstract will begin to examine a number of fieldwork settings that have been subject to natural disasters – a small village community in the North of England that was subjected to a flood and communities in Sichuan, China that suffered through the 2008 earthquake. Bell and Newby (1978) describe three aspects of community: a notion of geographical proximity, a notion of a particular social system and a notion of communion, or strong ties, belongingness and a sense of duty. More, recently, Mynatt et al (1998) through studies of networked communities have mirrored this, suggesting that the keys aspects of networked communities are: (1) boundaries that may be defined in terms of space or be more relational; (2) relationships that are persistent, multi-layered; (3) change that marks the community’s ongoing development. This abstract considers if and how communities manage relationships and boundaries that extend beyond the living and how they respond to events that have detrimental impact through different materials and artefacts – photographs in particular. Our aim in the final abstract is to begin exploring how these materials – and photographs in particular – have been used in these settings both through our own observations and incidents reported in the press and how these uses are related to the ongoing life, and indeed history, of communities. We wish this exploration to inform the recommendation and design of technologies that could operate in communities to support remembering, digital ‘monuments’ and ‘cenotaphs’, and even ongoing ‘digital’ protests.