Yasmin Jiwani: Virtual Graveyards and Cyber-Memorials: Charting the Terrain of Thanatechnologies

Yasmin Jiwani is a full professor in the Department of Communication Studies, and a Concordia University Research Chair in Intersectionality, Violence and Resistance.  Her research interests focus on a critical interrogation of the discursive ways in which racist-sexism is conceptualized and ideologically utilized in popular discourse. The particular sites which she has examined include media reportage of violence against Indigenous and racialized immigrant women, representations of Indigenous and Muslim youth in the popular press, as well as discourses of resistance articulated by marginalized groups in film and other popular media. Her most recent project is centered on cyber-memorials and virtual graveyards as reflections of the vernacular. Here, her analysis attends to race, gender and belonging as expressed in the narratives posted on these sites. She is the author of Discourses of Denial: Race, Gender and Violence, and co-editor of Girlhood, Redefining the Limits, and Faces of Violence in the Lives of Girls.