Sensing school shootings

ABSTRACT

School shootings are mediated by ways of sensing—through seeing bloodless, distant photographs and hearing retroactive eyewitness accounts. Yet at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, students’ cell phones offered a more immediate and immersive experience. This new way of seeing and hearing created a unique rhetoric situation. In the immediate aftermath, Emma González, a student and survivor of the Parkland shooting, seized upon this perspective to invent a new figure, the “Parkland Kid,” a generational stakeholder in the gun debate. The new subject position of the “Parkland Kid” expanded the range of thinkable thoughts, opened novel discursive strategies, and moved the intractable gun debate forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Senses
• Snapchat
• school shootings
• Emma González
• advocacy

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank Leah Ceccarelli, Kevin Deluca, Amy Pason, Emma Francis Bloomfield, Roger Stahl, Donovan Conley, Beth Innocenti, Tate Adams, and the anonymous reviewers for their help during the drafting and revising of this essay.