New publication by Kjetil Sandvik and Dorthe Refslund Christensen

Kjetil Sandvik published together with Dorthe Refslund Christensen the chapter “Sharing Death. Conceptions of time at a Danish online memorial site” in the anthology Taming Time, Timing Death (eds. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev), Ashgate.

Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik argue that the death of a child does not simply imply the end of a short life. It also ends the imagined future of the parents, who would have planned and envisioned various phases of life to be shared with their child. The ending of the child’s life, then, causes the parents’ time horizon to collapse and their world to radically change. On the website Mindet.dk, the parents get to share these experiences with other bereaved parents. This is not only about the parents keeping an ongoing relation to the dead child. Through different narratives and ritualizations the parents perform various kinds of timework, thus re-creating their sense of differentiated time and their ability to enroll themselves back into everyday social life. Drawing on the narrative theory of Paul Ricoeur, the chapter analyses how life, or rather the present, after the meaningless and devastating death of the infant, is re-established as a meaning-making process by ways of re-working and re-telling the past, online.

Read about the anthology here: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409450689