Death has been a phenomena that has been dealt with in varying ways throughout human history. How we deal with physical death online, specifically through Facebook, has proved to be an insightful challenge to the current digital age. The use of Facebook as the link between the living and the dead highlights the level at which we appropriate our Facebook profiles as extensions of our physical body due to the desire for reinvention associated with death. While only a few studies exist directly related to death on Facebook, they expose communities of mourners interacting with each other and the deceased on a surprisingly horizontal level, and contacting the dead without necessitating time restraints or religious/spiritual intermediaries. Traditional death rituals usually have temporal limits on liminal periods of mourning, divided between private and public time, but Facebook offers us unlimited access to memories of the deceased. The choice to mourn communally and virtually problematizes not only our personal relationships with the deceased, but also the legal ownership of our feelings and sentiments. The final element of death on Facebook examined in this paper is the spiritual space that deceased profiles occupy. For the secular and religious, these profiles give a virtually physical body to what might traditionally be called a spirit, which challenges the finality and permanence of death. In studying the posts and stories that decorate the profile walls of the deceased, it is clear that this virtual aspect of ourselves has very real elements, and it is exactly this questioning of reality that death demands of us in the first place. 

Contemporary US society has in many ways written off self-mutilation, the deliberate damage or modification of one’s body tissue without intention of suicide, as a pathological act whose roots lie in mental illness and destruction beyond any sort of rationality. Often, self-mutilation is linked to suicidal behavior, but even when it isn’t it bears a transgressive nature and is frequently met with repulsion. In order to understand and examine the effects of the transgression of self-mutilation on individuals and larger communities, I took into account some ways in which individuals in specifically religious contexts have been marginalized by these practices. Parts of the Lakota Sun dance involving self-mutilation were banned in the US between the years 1895-1978 and the Modern Primitives, a group that emerged in the late 1960s and 70s seeking to reclaim self-mutilating religious rituals were met with extreme ostracism. In my research I explored spiritual self-mutilation as a vehicle for connection to something beyond an individual’s bodily limits, examined the physical and psychological capacities humans have to endure intense physical sensation, and looked at the implications of the process of physical healing as a powerful and direct metaphor for spiritual healing. Taking all of these into consideration, with the help of the narrative of the Modern Primitives, I sought to understand the way in which, for many individuals, the brutal destruction and modification of skin and flesh becomes an act of creation, of reconstruction and life-affirmation. If we allow ourselves to reconsider our cultural taboos surrounding self-mutilation in a religious context, we begin to see that there may be a stronger, deeper connection between spiritual self-mutilation and pathological self-harm than we can realize, without taking a closer look at the roots of both.

UVC is ultraviolet light in the wavelengths 280 – 100nm. UVC’s germicidal ability has been employed to prevent forward contamination, or the contamination of a pure planetary body with terrestrial organisms. Scientists have used UVC to sterilize equipment on land and water, but the effective dose of UV needed to prevent contamination when probing a pure ice environment is still unknown. In order to safely explore pure icy environments, data of bacterial response to UVC in ice are needed. To create these data, we first irradiated Escherichia coli in water as there is a known decimation curve for this experiment, which serves to standardize our irradiation set up and techniques. After matching the decimation curve of Escherichia coli of previous UV sterilization experiments, we will then proceed to irradiate bacteria in ice. In addition to irradiating commonly tested bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilus, we will also irradiate samples of glacial isolates that would be more likely contaminants in an icy environment. Each sample of bacteria will be assessed before and after radiation using the Most Probable Number technique, or MPN. The MPN method uses serial dilutions of a sample bacterial culture until no colony forming bacteria are present to determine the concentration of bacteria present in the original sample. From our irradiations, we will create curves of UV dose versus survival of bacteria that will allow future equipment used in the exploration of pure icy environments to employ the correct dosage of UVC light to minimize forward contamination.