Abstracts Anthropology

Public Mourning, Online Spaces: Virtual Memorialization and Binational Grief in Israel-Palestine

by Lillian Kohn

This thesis, grounded in the work of digital anthropology, examines contemporary mourning practices in Israel-Palestine, looking at the ways in which people construct, interact with, and grieve within memorials both online and offline. This paper looks specifically at the binational mourning practice, the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Memorial Day Ceremony, that takes place during Yom HaZikaron, and further analyzes this ceremony as a form of counterpublics that bears witness to personal, communal and binational grief. Rather than reinforce a stark dichotomy between online and offline memorialization, however, this paper situates this memorial ceremony as an assemblage of bodies, objects and narratives that interact in both online and offline spaces. Through an examination of the digital components that work to construct the Israeli-Palestinian Joint Memorial Day Ceremony, this paper then turns to a discussion of the implications of binational mourning and memorialization practices that aim to commemorate a singular conception of Israeli-Palestinian grief.