Memento Mori: Noticing Death in Global Media

This introduction to the thematic issue examines the paradoxical position of death in contemporary media where it is simultaneously ubiquitous and unevenly represented, even while digital technologies are reshaping long-standing journalistic norms governing the visibility of the dead. The works—selected from different countries and regions of the world—emphasize the need for research that moves beyond exceptional cases to include diverse geopolitical contexts and everyday forms of mortality, particularly as social media broaden the spaces in which death, mourning, and posthumous presence circulate. The thematic issue aims to bring together scholarship on the cultural construction of death in various contexts and the resulting collection highlights how bodies remain sites of competing narratives, ethically charged decisions, and political contestation. The issue further investigates how linguistic, visual, and structural choices in news reporting determine whose deaths are counted, witnessed, or overlooked, and how these representational practices shape public understandings of mortality. Grounded in theories of social construction, national memory, and mediated visibility, the thematic issue explores the instability of death as an object of representation and the affective, moral, and epistemic negotiations underlying its portrayal.