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    Mourning on Mobile Media

    Everyday Affective Witnessing

    Author Larissa Hjorth
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    $45.00 US
    The MIT Press
    26 per carton
    On sale Nov 11, 2025 | 9780262553551
    Sales rights: World
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    How our mourning rituals on mobile media reflect our social, cultural and emotional lives.

    From Instagram eulogies of human and animal kin to witnessing mass human destruction on TikTok, mobile media practices play a significant role in contemporary grieving, memorializing, and mourning rituals in an age of permanent crisis. Our devices bear witness to the intimate, affective, embodied, and collective ways we mourn in, and through, contemporary media. In Mourning on Mobile Media, Larissa Hjorth aims to understand the role of mobile media mourning rituals as a reflection of our 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? The author argues that through these micronarratives—from eulogies about lost kin to more existential elegies about a loss of habit—we can connect, enhance kinship, and create hope in response to the overwhelming sense of crisis we face today.
    Contents
    Acknowledgments
    Part I: A New Way of Mourning
    1 Introduction: On Mobile Media Mourning and Affective Witnessing
    2 Methods for Mobile Media Mourning
    Part II: Mourning On, In, and Through Mobile Media
    3 Mourning Assumptive Worlds: Pandemic Grief
    4 Mourning Literacies
    Part III: More-than-Human Mobile Media Mourning
    5 Mourning Our More-than-Humans
    6 Mourning (Pet) Eulogies
    7 Mourning Ecogrief
    Part IV: Mourning Futures
    8 Mourning Death and Data Afterlives
    9 Mourning Unanticipated Futures
    Notes
    List of Figures
    Index
    additional book photo
    additional book photo
    ENDORSEMENTS

    “Hjorth’s unique ‘more-than-human’ perspective on mourning is a vital contribution to media studies. This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand contemporary media and the collective grief experienced from global pandemics, environmental crises, and natural disasters.”
    —Lee Humphreys, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication, Cornell University; author of The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life


    “With generosity and care for the griefs of ecological crisis, Larissa Hjorth illuminates the complex affectivities of witnessing and mourning in this urgently needed and all-too-timely book.”
    —Michael Richardson, Associate Professor, University of New South Wales; author of Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World

    About

    How our mourning rituals on mobile media reflect our social, cultural and emotional lives.

    From Instagram eulogies of human and animal kin to witnessing mass human destruction on TikTok, mobile media practices play a significant role in contemporary grieving, memorializing, and mourning rituals in an age of permanent crisis. Our devices bear witness to the intimate, affective, embodied, and collective ways we mourn in, and through, contemporary media. In Mourning on Mobile Media, Larissa Hjorth aims to understand the role of mobile media mourning rituals as a reflection of our 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? The author argues that through these micronarratives—from eulogies about lost kin to more existential elegies about a loss of habit—we can connect, enhance kinship, and create hope in response to the overwhelming sense of crisis we face today.

    Table of Contents

    Contents
    Acknowledgments
    Part I: A New Way of Mourning
    1 Introduction: On Mobile Media Mourning and Affective Witnessing
    2 Methods for Mobile Media Mourning
    Part II: Mourning On, In, and Through Mobile Media
    3 Mourning Assumptive Worlds: Pandemic Grief
    4 Mourning Literacies
    Part III: More-than-Human Mobile Media Mourning
    5 Mourning Our More-than-Humans
    6 Mourning (Pet) Eulogies
    7 Mourning Ecogrief
    Part IV: Mourning Futures
    8 Mourning Death and Data Afterlives
    9 Mourning Unanticipated Futures
    Notes
    List of Figures
    Index

    Photos

    additional book photo
    additional book photo

    Praise

    ENDORSEMENTS

    “Hjorth’s unique ‘more-than-human’ perspective on mourning is a vital contribution to media studies. This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand contemporary media and the collective grief experienced from global pandemics, environmental crises, and natural disasters.”
    —Lee Humphreys, Professor and Chair, Department of Communication, Cornell University; author of The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life


    “With generosity and care for the griefs of ecological crisis, Larissa Hjorth illuminates the complex affectivities of witnessing and mourning in this urgently needed and all-too-timely book.”
    —Michael Richardson, Associate Professor, University of New South Wales; author of Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World

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