Abstract
The murder of MP Jo Cox on 16 June 2016 brought the UK EU Referendum campaign to a shocked standstill, as reports emerged that the killer had shouted ‘Britain First’ after shooting and stabbing the MP. This chapter examines the role of the aesthetic and symbolic in the tweets shared by those responding to Jo Cox’s death. The author demonstrates how linkages between popular culture forms, visual tropes and symbols were deployed by those both expressing their identification as an emergent compassionate collectivity and, to a lesser degree, those who articulated their support for her murderer’s actions. The visual sharing practices on Twitter re-cast Jo Cox as a retrospective public figure whose values are to be admired. In becoming a publicly recognizable figure in the wake of her violent death, Jo Cox’s values become crystallized by the creative efforts of others, who form a community around her image and political vision.
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Notes
- 1.
The MeCoDEM project received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 613370.
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Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Stephen Coleman, Beth Johnson and Ian Bucknell for their guidance during the writing of this chapter. Any errors are my own.
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Parry, K. (2019). #MoreInCommon: Collective Mourning Practices on Twitter and the Iconization of Jo Cox. In: Veneti, A., Jackson, D., Lilleker, D.G. (eds) Visual Political Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18729-3_12
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