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Johanna Sumiala

Professor, University of Helsinki, Finland
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Johanna Sumiala is a professor of media and communication studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland; a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science; and a visiting professor at the University of Bath Centre for Death and Society. In recent years her work as a media anthropologist has focused on digital mediations of religion, death, victimhood, and populism in society. Sumiala’s work appears in several key journals including New Media & Society; Media, Culture & Society; Social Anthropology; and the International Journal of Communication. She has published several books including Media and Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2013) and Mediated Death (Polity, 2022). She is a past president of the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture and a founding member of the Helsinki Research Hub on Religion, Media and Social Change. Presently, she leads the CHANSE (Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe) research consortium Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife (DiDe, 2022–24).

Featured Work: Mediated Death; Hybrid Media Events: The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and the Global Circulation of Terrorist Violence; Media and Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life

Upcoming Projects: Digital Death: Transforming History, Rituals and Afterlife (2022–24). Sumiala is also working on projects titled “’We Are All Victims Now—A Cultural Analysis of the Identity Politics of Victimhood in the Age of Hybrid Media” and “The Social Life of the Dead in the Age of AI.”