Politicising Space, (In)visibilising Grief: Pandemic commemoration and the UK’s “National COVID Memorial Wall”

Abstract

This article contributes to knowledge on the politics of national commemoration in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by exploring the case of the United Kingdom (UK) and the ‘National COVID Memorial Wall’ in its material and digital manifestations. Questioning how the Wall functions socially and politically as a site of ‘national’ COVID-19 commemoration and using a combination of participatory in person and digital ethnographies, this article demonstrates how the Wall at once politicises public space while simultaneously serving to reinforce existing inequalities and patterns of (in)visibility while inadvertently overing the pandemic through its timing. While appraising the politics and space of the Wall in London and its digital version, this article highlights how inequalities exacerbated through the pandemic have (mis)informed and are reflected in the physical and virtual construction of the self-proclaimed ‘national’ COVID-19 memorial. Within a context defined by competitive victimhood and commemorative crowding which come to define ‘post’-pandemic society and make for fraught commemorative processes that ought to be approached by Governments’ with specific sensitivity, this article argues that the Wall politicises and opens up space within which previously contained grief becomes visible and felt while being limited in its capacity to make particular victims of the pandemic visible and thus to amplify marginalised and contained voices and grief.