Tal Morse

Supervisor: Lilie Chouliaraki| and Shani Orgad|

Research Interests: My main interest area is media and culture, including media rituals, visual communication, media portrayals of minorities, and GLBT studies.

Research Topic: Post Mortem: Death-Related Media Rituals (working title)

My PhD research studies death-related media rituals. The aim of the project is to advance an understanding of the role the media play at the occurrence of death, in the construction and reconstruction of a global, cosmopolitan community. In the global media sphere there are different voices that make different claims regarding the constitution of the global community and its solidarity. In this context, death plays a dominant role, demonstrating or reflecting the claim for social order and its maintenance in a global age. At the beginning of the 21st century, we often experience death through the media. The rituals that the media perform when death occurs, serve as a means to include or exclude different groups and to give a voice or silence the call for moral responsibility and caring for distant suffering.

In this project, I wish to study how the rituals that the media perform at the occurrence of death ("death-related media rituals") function as a cultural mechanism of inclusion/exclusion and facilitate social cohesion and a sense of community. I intend to focus on how representational means are in use in producing media rituals to delineate the boundaries of the imagined community, thus cultivating a sense of belonging. What is the nature of the imagined global community that such rituals construct? What kind of community do the death related media rituals delineate? Who gets to be "citizen of the world" and whose "citizenship" is denied? How do the death-related media rituals serve as a site of struggle for the claims different actors make regarding the global social order?

The project compares and contrasts the coverage of global mass-death events, events in which relatively large number of people died and they bear the potential to become an event of global significance. I shall examine two news networks that give voice to these two rival narratives: BBC World and Al-Jazeera English.

Publications

• Morse, T (forthcoming) Shooting the Dead: Presentation of Dead Bodies in Israeli Media. In: Aaron, M. (Ed). Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
• Morse, T. (2010) Photographs of dead bodies in Israeli media. Protocols: History and Theory, 18 – Dead End; http://bezalel.secured.co.il/zope/home/he/1286358025/1286377696
• Morse, T. (2008) Hebrew GaySpeak: Subverting a gender-based language. Texas Linguistic Forum, 52: 204-209

Active Participation Academic Conferences

• The 9th International Conference Crossroads in Cultural Studies, Paris, France, July 2012 (forthcoming): Images of death, inclusion and exclusion in the Israeli press
• ICA Annual Conference - Communication and Community, Phoenix, Arizona, May 2012 (forthcoming): Images of death, inclusion and exclusion in the Israeli press
• CMN2012: Communicating in a World of Norms - Information and Communication in Contemporary Globalization, GERIICO, ICA and the SFSIC, Roubaix, France, March 2012 (forthcoming): Representation of death in Israeli media
• The Dynamics of Images in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Tel Aviv University, Israel, November 2011: Death images, inclusion and exclusion in Israeli Media
• 2011 International Visual Sociology Association Conference, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, July 2011: Shooting the Dead: Photographs of dead bodies in Israeli media [Eng.]
• Minority Identities: Rights and Representation, University of Reading, UK, May 2011: The Construction of GLBT Collective Memory in Israel [Eng.]
• Visual Communication and Ethics, School of Communication, Sapir College, Israel, April 2011: Ethics and practice of presentation of mortal images in the Israeli press [Heb.]
• Queer Linguistics: Between Theory and Applicability, Austrian Linguistics Conference, Graz University, Austria, October 2010: Hebrew GaySpeak: Subverting a Gender-Based Language [Eng.]
• The End of the Road, Department of History and Theory, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, December 2009: Regarding the Death of Others: Photographs of Dead Bodies in Israeli Media[Heb.]
• Metaksherim, University of Haifa, December 2009: Regarding the Death of Others: Photographs of Dead Bodies in Israeli Media[Heb.]
• Envisaging Death: Visual Culture and Dying, University of Birmingham, UK, June 2009: Shooting the Dead: Photographs of Bodies in Israeli Media [Eng.]
• The 7^th Convention of the Israeli Association for the Study of Language and Society, Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv, June 2008: Gum Ani Bnuya Axeret (I am Also Built Differently): Israeli-Hebrew Queer Discourse [Heb.]
• Symposium About Language and Society (SALSA), University of Texas, Austin, April 2008: Hebrew GaySpeak: Subverting a Gender-Based Language [Eng.]
• Metaksherim, University of Haifa, December 2007: Collective Memory and the Closet: The Construction of Gay Collective Memory in Israel [Heb.]

Contact: t.morse@lse.ac.uk|