Paper together with Dorthe Refslund Christensen as part of the panel "Everyday digital media use in a life course perspective" at the ECREA 2016 conference in Prague November 12th 2016.

1. Uses of media in everyday
practices of grief among
bereaved parents
ECREA, Prague November 12th 2016
Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Associate Professor, Dept. of Aesthetics
and Communication, Aarhus University
Kjetil Sandvik, Associate Professor, Dept. of Media, Cognition and
Communication, University of Copenhagen

2. Creating presence
• Grief and everyday life practices among
bereaved parents: continuous work (with
different intensities) on the loss of the child
and on being parents to a dead child.
• What situations, what materialities, and what
media are used by parents in their
griefwork* and in their efforts to keep on
living with the dead child and to keep
continuing relations (bonds) to the child.
*coined by Erich Lindemann (1944) and displayed in his three stage model for grief management:
1) emancipation from the bondage to the deceased; 2) readjustment to the environment in
which the deceased is missing; 3) the formation of new relationships

3. Everyday life
• self-organized, shaped and structured by the
individual: no established behavioral or conductive
framework (opposite non-everyday life practices,
which are institutionalized, like weddings, burials
etc.)
• this is turned into routines or even rituals: we do
not invent the structures of conduct in our
everyday life every day.
• there are more factors than just ‘personal styles’
that influences how this is done, e.g. a specific life
situation (e.g. being a bereaved parent)

4. Media
• Both what we generally conceive
of as media (e.g. a website) and
objects or materialities that are
turned into media (achieve media
status) through everyday practice.
• As such our ubiquitous media
uses relates both to how everyday
practices adopt media logics and
the ways in which we both invent
new media and (re)appropriate
and change existing media to suit
our needs.
• Objects as media have been used
on graves throughout history:
communicating rituals, social
status, gender etc.

5. Keeping contact with the dead…
• The grave as a relations-building
place: not so much the home for
the dead as a meeting place
between the living and the dead
(child’s grave at Nordre Kirkegård,
Aarhus)
• ’Hanging out with the dead’: the
cemeterery as recreational space
(photo from Assistens Kirkegård,
Copenhagen)
• Both strategies are found in
designated online memorial sites or
etherized profiles on e.g. Facebook

6. Angels, not souls
• The common use of the term
‘angel’ for the dead child (angel
child) and for the parents (angel
parents) implies that the child and
the relation to it is embedded into
everyday life as a continuous
existent instead of solely as
something with just a past (the
child died and now it is gone and
now we miss it):
• As an ‘angel’ (as opposed to e.g.
‘soul’) the child is still there, it can
be communicated to/with and it
can be communicated about in
ways that contain more than the
narrative of loss and the child who
died.

7. Keeping the dead close
• The co-existence with the
living inflicts the ways in
which the ‘angel child’ is
ubiquitously mediated
through a variety of media
• from the ‘memory tattoo’ to
online photo albums on
Instagram,
• from closed groups on
Facebook to open
discussion forums on
various websites for
parenthood, pregnancy etc.,
• from the online memory
profile to the burial site.

8. Don’t rest in peace
• Graves and online memorial
sites: designated
communicational and
performative places for specific
ritualistic practices put into
play and negotiated over time
• These are carried out in order
to perform the ongoing – and
evolving – relationship with the
dead child and thus performing
parenthood.
– ’stay with us’
– ’stay near’
– ’you were here and you are still
here and you are still part of us’
– ’this is our child, we are a
family, we are parents’

9. Changing paradigms
• Stages: grief as a linear
process after which we let
go and move on
• Continuing bonds: grief,
loss and relations are
embedded in everyday life:
• Results in changing
practices concerning how
we perceive grief processes
and the ways in which we
address death and loss.

10. Performing parenthood
• From ’parent to a child that
died’
• to ’parents to a dead child’:
e.g. ”we have three
children, one of them is an
’angel’”
• Everyday practices concern
the inclusion of the dead
child in the life and doings
of the parents/the family:
e.g. holidays or celebrations
of birthdays, Christmas etc.
Example from child’s grave:
The child ’talks’ through the wind
mill when it moves

11. The role of media in griefwork and
everyday practices
Christensen & Sandvik: “Grief and everyday life. Bereaved parents communicating presence across media”, in The media and the
mundane. Communication across media in everyday life, Nordicom 2016

12. • “The tattoo is about
giving the children
presence and having
them with me
always.”
– From the exhibition
‘Mindesmærker’

13. Closing
• The parents perform practices that
establish the child as a being with
whom a relationship is built,
maintained and developed in order for
the parents, eventually, to integrate
the dead child into their everyday
parental and family life.
• The practices performed in both
private and public spheres (at home,
on graves, online memorial sites and
social media, through personal
memory tattoos, family photos, the
use of material objects etc.) are –
more than anything – about
negotiating, (re)appropriating,
(re)mediating and performing both
parenthood and the existence and
presence of the child.