Kaitlyn L. Kinney is a folklorist who advocates for the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the contemporary experiences of death, dying, and loss. Her background as a folklorist is rooted in the merging of health folkloristics, personal experience narrative, stigmatized vernaculars, social movements, and digital folklore as a means for examining how people communicate (or don’t) about these experiences in their everyday lives. Her work in this has led her to serve on the advisory board for the Journal of Folklore and Education for an upcoming special issue on death and dying. And, she is currently aiding in the completion and publication of the recently deceased folklorist Janet Langlois’s forthcoming book ‘Other Worlds: Talking About the Dead Returning’, which examines personal experience narratives of deathbed visions in hospice care.
Abstract: This keynote addresses death’s problematic place in the shifting American deathscape– the places (conceptually, physically, and virtually) associated with dying and death that are imbued with various meanings and associations. Practicing an interdisciplinary approach to this subject sheds light on the dynamism occuring within the United States in relation to vernacular death communication. And, it provides a unique framework for scholars documenting how people acknowledge and respond to the ways death remains meaningful across shifting spatial and temporal contexts.
Death is often described as a force that simultaneously silences and is silenced in our everyday lives, but they are not empty silences. Instead, they reverberate throughout time and space building anxieties, beliefs, and tensions becoming expressed within performances of everyday life. Biomedicine shifts Western conceptions of the body, affecting American vernacular death communication, leading many thanatological scholars to argue that Americans no longer practice an Ars moriendi—the art of dying. Important to this conversation is the emergence of thanatological social movements – grassroots groups that are typically focused on bringing awareness to stigmas around experiences of death and dying. Engaging with discomfort, these movements develop online storytelling practices as a form of vernacular death communication. And through this, the liminal nature of these virtual places allows for these performers to pull from familiar communicative strategies, while also creating their own grassroots methods to speak of death past the silences within American thanatoculture.
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