The Practice of Not Knowing
This is a comic that explores the affective experience of sharing a built environment and material cultures, making and re-making more-than-human kinship, and dealing with anticipatory grief with…
Tag: Grief
Grief is a thing to be sung: solace from Shi’a lamentation
By Aleeha Zahra Ali A year and a half ago, I learnt what grief was. Before that I had known waves of sadness, despair, depression, heartbreak and anger.…
Introduction to Book Forum on Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War by Andrew Brandel
Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of…
My Reflections Two Years After Surviving a Classroom Shooting
Today marks two years since a classroom shooting happened while teaching my final class at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Six students were shot, two of which…
Screen Memories, Scarlet Witch & the Complex Grief of Wandavision
By Emma Louise Backe In the first several episodes of Disney’s new show Wandavision, it’s unclear whether the “bit” of old sitcoms as the framing device will be…
Taking Stock in California: Inequity & Grief
Having meaningful conversations about systemic racism and social immobility can connect people as much as the act of absorbing someone else’s microcosm of grief and relating to it.…
How Do We Listen to the Living?
I opened my twitter on June 15, to read a non-Black person describe the murder of Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau as an “act of god.” They quote retweeted a…
The Chaos of Asynchronous Grief
Spoiler: I hate to say it, but Americans have only begun the five stages of grief, and we aren’t all going through it in the same way…
Grief and Getting Beyond the Endgame
The lasting impact of Avengers: Endgame on our understandings of heroism, masculinity, and mental health. By Emma Louise Backe An hour before I walked in to see Avengers: Endgame,…
The Liminality of Grief in Trauma
As time continues to press forward after the April 30 shooting at UNCC, I have continued to reflect, think about my experience, and discuss the experiences with others…
Compassionate Cannibalism
Returning again to the ethnography by Conklin that started my thinking on this issue, the experience of compassionate cannibalism of the Wari spoke to the collective experiences of…
In praise of the scaffolding
In my experience, when the ethnographic mission collapsed, this scaffolding remained standing, rich and complex, in plain view. There, the net into which I fell. (Rosaldo 2014: 112)…
How Do We View Death in Fiction?
The question of how death is handled and viewed in the horror industry popped into my head earlier this week as I eagerly awaited the release of The…
Anthropological Reflections on a Family Death
Comparing my own experiences of death to those of the Tiwi culture that I learned of in my anthropology studies, the void that I felt in the months…