Digital materialities in the diasporic mourning of migrant death

Abstract

This article examines memorialization among the family and friends of those who have died at the world’s deadliest border in the Mediterranean Sea. Digital media platforms are central spaces for new, innovative forms of coping with ambiguous loss or the inability to mourn over a dead body. The analysis focuses on the role of digital media technologies and the relationship between digital and material elements in memorialization. I examine the creation and circulation of digital objects of memorialization: visual assemblages in which the material and digital intertwine. The analysis demonstrates that digital media practices are not separate from the material world, nor do they make mourning and memorializing less human or less authentic. On the contrary, in transnational and mobile circumstances, digital technologies facilitate human, ethical engagement with complicated grief. Memorializing is crucial for both the private and the public lives of diasporic communities. In Europe, public recognition of the memorialization of refugee deaths would increase understanding of the human consequences of the border, allowing the dead to be seen as individuals with human relationships rather than as numbers.