Serial Killers and the Production of the Uncanny in Digital Participatory Culture

Serial Killers and the Production of the Uncanny in Digital Participatory Culture

Everywhere you look, the serial killer looks back at you. Streaming services finance endless documentaries about notorious killers, broadcast networks greenlight miniseries telling similar stories, podcasters jump in, social media debates ensue, amateur content proliferates – around the world. There seems to be an uncanny alliance between participatory digital media culture and the mythos of the serial killer. The serial killer, we argue, is not an accidental exemplar of contemporary digital culture—it is a totem upon which people can project their anxieties about dehumanisation uniquely experienced in a digital environment. For our argument, we consider what people – professionals and amateurs alike – do online with the serial killer as practices that function to (re-)appropriate existing serial killer discourse into a new media language that belongs to the Internet. 

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Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Four): Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Four): Passing Down and Following Up: Jewish Cuisine’s Umbrella Potential

Jewish communities may all have originated from the Twelve Tribes of Israel, but they have transformed over time and space, moved, merged as well as diverged.  So did their cuisine: Jewish cooking and eating is multifaceted and yet highly capable of dialogue. It is a marker of religious and cultural belonging, its historical and contemporary features and possesses a commendable diversity, deriving from the various patterns that form belonging to a broader Jewish sphere. Exploring the “Jewish Food Society” with its storytelling around passed down family recipes, I focus on the combination of tradition and adaption. Through a focus on the practices of cooking and eating in a Jewish context, their change overtime, for instance, concerning valorisation and trendsetting, can be traced, and tracked. This adds up to the formation of Jewish cuisine as a term with interconnections between prescribed dietary laws – the Kashrut – and local as well as global conditions, ultimately leading to a pluralistic approach to “Jewish Cuisine”. Sparking civic imagination, this can serve as a soft though powerful approach to resilient relations of inclusivity, when pictured with a certain openness for its combinability.

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