Desmond Upton Patton, a professor at Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) and Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, co-authored a new paper that investigates the significance of photographs in the online grieving practices of Black children who are involved with gangs.
The study is thought to be the first of its sort, and it intends to contribute to a limited corpus of scholarship. Dr. Patton, a pioneer in the multidisciplinary merger of social work, communications, and data science, coauthored the new study and served as senior author.
The paper, released by New Media & Society, investigates how gang-affiliated Black teenagers utilize Twitter content, photographs, and emojis—known as multimodal tweets—to remember the deceased and cope with grief and loss.
The researchers examined a dataset of Twitter chats among kids living in Chicago neighborhoods with high levels of gang involvement, looking critically at the influence of racial segregation and sorrow on this population’s offline experiences.
Their findings show that multimodal tweets are inextricably tied to the grief process among gang-affiliated Black kids. This group of young people uses images to communicate with those who have died and stay connected to their lost loved ones.
Overall, the study provides information that can help build prevention and intervention techniques for gang-affiliated kids who are grieving or experiencing loss.
