The cultural life of suicide : observing care and death at MIT

Four undergraduate students died by suicide during my enrollment at MIT between 2013 and 2017. I document the ways in which suicide becomes more than the event of death itself, embedding itself back into everyday life. Suicide becomes what I describe as ambient and infrastructural, articulated through community traditions, announcement emails, Facebook posts, publicity posters, awareness flags, and all the other structures and artifacts of daily life in the MIT community. Drawing on field observations with the student-run texting help line Lean On Me, as well as interviews of students and administrators working in campus mental health organizations, I then explore how mental health organizations approach their work within an environment where suicide is ambient and infrastructural.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Ko, Allan, S.B. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• T.L. Taylor.

• Comparative Media Studies.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/140444

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/140444