Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Anthropology

Reader 1

Gabriela Morales

Reader 2

Seo Young Park

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Rights Information

© 2026 Isabella R Sullivan

Abstract

This thesis analyses the practice of documenting and uploading roadside memorials in the Western United States as a socially transformative process facilitated between two distinct kinds of noticing. Drawing on (auto)ethnographies of roadside memorial sites in Colorado and California, interviews with photographers and cartographers working primarily in the American Southwest, and Google Street View media, this research examines how recognition of the social negotiations involving memory and mortality that are already present in the physical shrines evolves when documenters capture and transpose them online. First, these documenters have developed the “eyes to see” roadside memorials for various significant reasons in Western roadscapes designed to condition drivers into only thinking about getting where they’re going; ranging from systematic “archivists” to “aesthetic narrators” to one spiritual “healer,” these documenters share spontaneous and embodied encounters with the physical memorials while capturing them on roadsides that drivers normally wouldn’t look twice at.

This recognition is then translated through digital distillation into persistent and boundless online platforms, each uniquely curated so that roadside memorials transcend physical decay into the digital afterlife: a collective of maps, galleries, messages, and mementos across these documenters’ projects that embed every published shrine into a network of memorial visibility and discourse. Here, roadside memorials aren’t encountered spontaneously, but through mediated means that make them searchable, shareable, and acknowledgable from anywhere at any time, producing new forms and effects of noticing both on and offline. These new recognitions ultimately challenge dominant logics of automobility that privilege unthoughtful, speedy driving through U.S. roadscapes, transforming wider relations with American roads from mere utilitarian travel corridors into landscapes for collective memory and moral engagement.

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