Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

explores the ways gender, race and class structure the manifestations of death in the digital/media space. It then
focuses on the way these rituals challenge the conception of death itself. It suggests that the digital/media traces of
death may not be a remain of a living, rather an assemblage with performative power, which transforms dead into
active beings.
Fanny Georges & Virginie Julliard
Post-mortem digital identity on Facebook from a gender perspective
Our paper examines how memorial writing practices recompose postmortem digital identity in Facebook
(memorial accounts, profiles created from living). We pay particular attention to the ways the
representations of dead people manifest and crystallize tensions between the constitution of a grieving
community and the maintenance of interpersonal relationships with the deceased. To answer these
questions, we conducted a semiotic analysis of 45 profile pages and 37 community pages (all having a
memorial purpose) linked to 43 dead persons, by focusing on the conflicts of representation of dead people.
These conflicts rely on the multiplicity of the online contributions, leading to a multiplicity of points of view
on the deceased (the “death for oneself”). To seize them, we pursue a gender analysis of the different roles
and hierarchies at work in the link between the deceased and the bereaved.
Jamil Dakhlia & Nelly Quemener
France
Whose death deserves publicity? Media coverage of celebrities’ death in
This communication unravels the process beneath the mediatization of the personalities’ death in France. By
catching media attention, the death of national or international celebrities such as Raymond Aubrac or
Whitney Houston, reveals a celebration process and the legitimization of one’s life work and persona. It
sheds light on the various moral values attributed by journalists to the personality, on the newsworthiness of
his/her death as well as his/her subversive or normative relationship to social norms. By looking at the
circulation of the news of a celebrity’s death during the year 2012, as well as the representation of his/her
life and his/her work, this paper aims at defining how the media coverage of death is built in terms of class,
race and gender as well as of celebrity making.
Marco Dell’Omodarme Actualizing metaphors: life as a sym-poietic system
“Make Kin Not Babies!” Looking for a slogan for the Chthulucene we are living through, Donna Haraway
points that, as far as living is a making it has to be thought as a network making. Kinship is the way
connexions can take form and whether it is possible to any-living-and-not-living-one to build connexion with
any-living-and-not-living-one, the essential point is that what really happens is that some-living-and-notliving-one
get actually connected, and some others don’t. Kinship is not a general connexion, it is the very
connexion that structures living (or being) in every forms. Sym-poiesis is the way we can think how beings
emerge by and through the action of a multiplicity of other beings in their connected existence. Far from
thinking dead people presence on the web as a remains of the living, we could grasp the multiple aspects life
can take in and through kinships that pop-up from the material existence of connexions. Starting for
Haraway’s approach, I will try to outline an inclusive landscape able to shelter our lost beings.
5R
Forms of Digital Modernity in Indonesia (Chair, Emma Baulch)
In this panel, four researchers present their studies of digital change in Indonesia. They do so through a focus on
cultural forms that have played influential roles in shaping the country’s post-colonial modernity: pejabat (public
officials), pemuda (youth), veiled women and advertisements. The panel aims to extend the agenda for researching
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