ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the use of visual small stories for mobilizing and scaling up mourning on Twitter in the case of the death of Alan Kurdi, the three-year old boy who drowned on September 2, 2015, when the inflatable boat he was on capsized. The analysis looks at different phases of the circulation of images portraying his death, which became iconic, and the different types of reactions provoked by their circulation on Twitter. It shows how visual small stories of ecstatic mourning in this case contributed to the sharing of cosmopolitan emotions and identities. As I argue, these identities were enacted through types of affective positioning which signalled distance from rather than proximity to the death event and the dead boy, illustrating the mobilization of mourning as a resource for engaging in cosmopolitan modes of digital mourning.
