About
7
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Introduction
Robert M. Bednar is Professor of Communication Studies at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, USA, where he teaches courses in media studies, visual communication, critical/cultural studies, and automobility. His work as an analyst, photographer, and theorist focuses on the performative dimensions of everyday communicative behavior, particularly the ways that people perform identities visually, materially and spatially as they negotiate public spaces.
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Publications
Publications (7)
This is an essay about how the material remains of automobile crashes remain in place to give road trauma a performative dimension through material objects. The paper draws on two decades of fieldwork on multiple roadside shrines throughout the American Southwest, but focuses on the site of the 1989 Alton school bus crash, which claimed the lives o...
Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside car crash shrines—or what I call road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends hav...
This article explores affect and memory at roadside car crash memorials within the context of what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics”: the performance of power to determine who legitimately can kill both persons and the memory of persons. By analyzing the ritualized performance of compulsory compassion in news media stories about the actual or th...
