Cultural Studies PhD student Terilee Edwards-Hewitt has just published an article titled "#PutYourSticksOut: Public Expressions of Grief on Twitter about the Humboldt Broncos Accident" in the new issue of the Popular Culture Studies Journal.
Terilee presented her research as part of the Cultural Studies Student Panel hosted by the Cultural Studies Organizing Committee in Spring 2020.
See below for an abstract of the article:
"On April 6, 2018, after a playoff game in the amateur Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League, a bus carrying members of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team collided with a semi-truck when the driver of the truck failed to yield at a flashing stop sign. Fourteen people on the bus died, two others critically injured died later in hospital, and thirteen were injured. While tributes occurred locally, individual performances of public grief were shared by over 30,000 Twitter users in the week after the accident, many by people who had no direct connection to the team or that region of Canada. Social media offers powerful ways to document, share, and mobilize social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Occupy, and Me Too. In addition to large, powerful movements and events, much of social media’s content is concerned with commerce or the minutiae of everyday life. A significant aspect of social media is sharing, which includes the positive and negative aspects of life (Christensen and Gotved 3). Social media allows people from around the world to associate with others who share the same interests, creating new virtual social networks of people (Sanderson and Cheong 328). This new network of online communities enables social media users to share grief with others and create new mourning rituals (Christensen and Gotved 4; Pantti and Sumiala 120)."
To read Terilee's article, please follow this link.
Terilee's previously published paper, "Immigrant Alexandria: An Ongoing Oral History Project in Alexandria, Virginia," can be found in the Journal of Urban Anthropology/Revista De Antropologie Urbana.
October 01, 2020