Mourning the Commons: Circulating Affect in Crowdfunded Funeral Campaigns

Abstract

This article focuses on the role of circulated affect in crowdfunded funeral campaigns, which have attracted little scholarly attention so far. This study is based on content analysis of online campaigns (N = 50) and qualitative interviews (N = 10) with campaign supporters and initiators. Its aim is to connect crowdfunded funeral campaigns to the larger digital-sharing economy. The findings of the study suggest that in order to gather sufficient funds to cover funeral costs, individuals share emotionally evocative narratives and images with their social networks and an imagined Internet audience with the expectation of attracting compassion. The study shows that political movements, media coverage, and sharing on social media platforms are integral to the success of campaigns for socially marginal individuals. The article contributes to the growing study of crowdwork and finds persistent structural inequalities in crowdfunding campaigns, thereby contesting the ethos of the digital commons.

Crowdfunding and global health disparities: an exploratory conceptual and empirical analysis

“…Crowdfunding has a remarkable reach in public and private discourses because of its ability to maximize traditional and new media formats to spread campaigns. It has also become a means through which citizens express allegiance with, or support for, particular identities, political causes, or activist movements [82]. Crowdfunding campaigns have become increasingly visible platforms for political discourse, as is evident in the cases of cholera funding in Zimbabwe and border-wall funding in the USA.…”

Like a Grinding Stone: How Crowdfunding Platforms Create, Perpetuate, and Value Health Inequities

“…Crowdfunding companies rely on these dynamics for success while projecting a marketplace of opportunity and kindness. In this way, crowdfunding is part of a broader gig economy that promises freedom while delivering abandonment and precarity (Gray and Suri 2019 ; Kneese 2018 ). Charity can be as much a part of these processes of economic abandonment as other sectors (Spade 2020 ).…”

“…Berliner and Kenworthy ( 2017 ) found that inequitable and historically rooted notions of moral deservingness shape campaign success; those with the most complex, chronic conditions struggled most in appealing to this ethic. In a qualitative study of funeral crowdfunding, Kneese ( 2018 ) described how campaigns were embedded within unequal technological, media, and social environments that heightened inequitable outcomes. Most of these studies focus largely on campaign creation and financial outcomes as metrics for measuring inequality, leaving out questions of how campaigners arrive at, and subjectively experience, unequal outcomes.…”

“…In this apparently meritocratic, individualistic marketplace of hope, many crowdfunders find “failure” as their “begging” is met with silence. Precarity reinforced by crowdfunding echoes broader political economies of gig work and “crowdwork” that are both necessary and wholly insufficient for financial survival (Gray and Suri 2019 ; Kneese 2018 ).…”

To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown

“…The theoretical frameworks applied to the study of crowdfunding to date have been limited, especially in terms of exploring subjectivities and social 'becoming'. Kenworthy (2018) usefully applies a lens of affect to think about entanglements between North American donors and recipients in the global South, as does Kneese (2018) in analysing some highly politicised funeral campaigns, which required creators to consider an imagined audience, and social contexts, as well as the specific mechanisms of the platform. Gonzales et al (2018) draws on the framework of 'identity shift' to consider the dynamic relationship between public self-presentation to audiences, and to consider how this may enact a change in user identity (through internalising these as part of the self).…”